Crooked (16 page)

C h a p t e r                           2 4

 
S
ealing the last barrel, Barney wiped his arm across his brow and tried not to peer into his surroundings. He hoped all his players were out there, somewhere. Minutes earlier, he’d checked the trash pile—the gun box was missing.

He drove the van around to the back of the stadium and over to the bulkhead where the boat was parked. The
Devil Dog
sat lower than before, and Barney checked his pocket watch. Full low tide was an hour away. At full low tide, the
Devil Dog
might be stuck in the muddy bottom of the Harlem River.

Using a hand truck, he carted a barrel down to the boat and used the contents to top off the barrels he’d hidden there with gold pellets. While he figured each of the barrels weighed about 200 pounds, filled top to bottom with gold they would weigh more. So he turned down the lantern and poured buckets of water into each barrel to bolster their heft. Then he went about sealing them.

When he was through, he trudged back ashore, set the lantern on the van’s bumper, and picked up his thermos. Now if they’d just give him enough time to finish a cup of coffee and take a breather. He took a sip. Nope.

“Mr. Swires.” Drummond Yager’s Argentine companion wandered in from the darkness, black patent leather boots flashing beneath the huge fox coat.

“Silvi, hello, I uh…” Caught with his hand in the cookie jar.

“Drummond, did he say you must get a boat? I don’t think so, Barney.”

“I, uh, well…” Gee, Mom, I wasn’t going to eat any of the cookies.

She stood not three feet in front of him, arms folded, legs apart so that her eyes were almost down to his level. She raised a finger and started pointing, counting silently.

“You know, I see…forty barrels? Twenty in boat, twenty in van. That make it too many barrels. Should be maybe only twenty, Barney. How come so many barrels?” Her eyebrows mocked him.

“What are you doing here, Silvi? Does Drummond…” Barney leaned back against the van to put some distance between them.

“No, he is not here.” She took a step forward and put an arm on his shoulder. Her eyes inspected his, then her lips attached to his.

Barney pushed her away, but her hands held him to her by the belt. “What’s this all about, Silvi?”

“Boat barrels have gold, or maybe van barrels have gold, eh? So you tell Silvi where is the gold—boat or truck?” She kissed him again, and almost made off with his bottom lip. “Barney, you are a double-crossing bastard, with nice blue eyes. I like that very much.”

Attractive? Barney supposed she was, like a model in a magazine. But close up? Tall, severe-looking. All in all, she scared the hell out of him.

A catty smile slinked across her mouth, and it looked like kitty was coming in for another bite. Barney felt a sudden jolt of pain to his forehead the instant before his brain flashed white and his knees gave.

“Wow, what a bashie!” Maureen gasped, eye fixed to her camera.

“It’s called a coco-nobby.” Nicholas was glued to the binoculars.

“A what?”

“When somebody smacks your head with theirs. It’s called a—”

“In Brooklyn it’s called a bashie. I thought Swires was gonna get lucky there at first. Think we should go over and…”

“No, no, no, not yet…bingo! Look over there. Guess who else just dropped in? This is too good to be true. I hope you brought your gun, Maureen.”

Maureen sighed. Nicholas didn’t even carry a gun. Pathetic.

Silvi loved doing that. Men could be such delightful idiots.

She stepped up to where Barney lay on the ground and put a boot on his neck. This time, Silvi wasn’t going to be cheated. This time, she was going to enact the double cross that she always warned her employers about—and got punished for. Barney gagged helplessly as she fished through his pockets and came up with the van’s keys. She’d leave this little man for the dogs. Drummond would punish Barney for botching the job, unless of course he thought Barney was a part of Silvi’s scheme. Either way, he would kill him, so she didn’t need to.

“What a novel tableau.”

Silvi checked her reaction of surprise as Drummond sauntered into the circle of light.

“Good thing you are here, Drummond. Our friend, I think he has ideas. Barney brings a boat, you see, with twenty barrels.”

Drummond gave her an enigmatic side-glance from under the hood of his fur-lined parka. Snatching up the lantern with a dip of his paw, he went to the van’s open doors and pushed on a barrel or two—clearly too light to contain gold. Then he went to the boat, and when he couldn’t budge those barrels, he popped a lid. He held the lantern high.

Standing on the bulkhead, Silvi’s dark eyes glowed yellow as Drummond dug into the beads to check their depth.

“That’s it, Drummond? We have it?”

Drummond fished around in his coat pocket and drew out a small pistol. Silvi’s heart sank as he pointed at her. Then he smiled, raised it to the sky, and pulled the trigger.

Hot red balls of flame streaked into the sky. Flares. She looked back at Drummond in confusion.

“My dear Silvi. Can you explain why you didn’t call me when he discovered the gold, as I instructed you?”

“I see he is up to something, so I come to see. I cannot tell you what I do not see.” A plane zoomed low overhead.

“Too bad, really.” Drummond produced a road flare, ignited it, and set it on the gunnel of the boat. “You see, I’ve spent fifteen years at Newcastle Warranty. An excellent employer. Really. But an employer nonetheless.” He stirred the gold beads, admiring their dull luminosity. “During my tenure, I’ve recovered over nine hundred ninety million dollars in lost assets, and reaped a cumulative salary amounting to under four million dollars, including bonuses.”

“Drummond, we must get barrels back to my truck and…” Silvi was grabbing at straws, but Drummond ignored her.

“So what with benefits, let’s say four million plus. All right, now add that to my pension. Perhaps a million. That’s five million, in return for almost a billion dollars. Why, that’s one half of one percent. A paltry finder’s fee, wouldn’t you say?”

The roar of an engine echoed in from the river, pushing a rush of cold air.

“But this way, my cut works out to a smidgen under three percent, a rather modest finder’s fee, all things considered.” The glow of the gold left his hooded eyes as he resealed the barrel.

She knew he’d intended to rip off Newcastle, but now she realized that he would probably stiff her too.

“Yes, now we maybe both get money we have long waited for,” she interjected confidently.

Drummond eyed her a moment from the recesses of his fur-lined hood, and smiled weakly. “Of course. But do you think that I’m
really
doing this for the money? No, not for the money.”

Flood lamps flashed behind him as a seaplane roared upriver toward the cove. Propeller wash blasted a spray of glittering river water in its wake.

“Fifteen years, my hand and my soul frittered away in every filthy nook of this stinking planet all to recoup Newcastle’s bad wagers. And now they have a mind to retire poor old Drummond. It was a pact with Lucifer from the start,” he shouted over the plane’s roar. “Fair’s fair: the
Bunker Hill
for my soul.”

He loosed a peculiar, nonchalant laugh that made Silvi shudder. It was the laugh he’d made in his sleep.

“FREEZE!” From behind the pickup, Maureen trained her Glock at Silvi. If she was going to shoot anybody, she wanted to shoot the woman who’d coldcocked her. Perhaps get herself a fur after all—the hard way.

Nicholas walked breezily past Maureen, the antithesis of her SWAT-style entrance.

“Hi, folks.” He smiled and waved at the assemblage. Under the big yellow wing of a twin-engine float plane, Drummond, Silvi, and the bearded pilot who must be del Solar were hoisting the last of the barrels up into the plane from the
Devil Dog
.

Nicholas leaned over Barney, who still lay sprawled on the snow. He could see his pupils moving under his closed eyelids.

“Faker.” Nicholas smiled and turned back toward the tableau. They squinted in his direction.

“The lady back there with the gun used to be a cop. She’s a good shot, so no monkeying around, OK? We don’t want anybody getting hurt.” They didn’t move, but Nicholas could feel them scheming. “C’mon, I want all you nice people to keep your hands where I can see them and come ashore.”

Drummond put a mitten on his hood and yanked it back, his overbite quivering in amused awe. “Why, if it isn’t Nicholas Palihnic! I’d venture you’re a better swimmer than I imagined.”

“Smith?” Nicholas did a double take. “Devlin Smith?”

“Yo, Nicholas.” Maureen kept her finger firmly on the trigger. “Let’s say we cuff your old school chum and his pals, OK?”

“My, Nicholas, it has been a long time since we did business.” Drummond let his hands drift downward.

“Keep those hands up, Smith,” Nicholas warned. “It hasn’t been that long. I can only imagine how you got out of that scrape in Borneo. I saw that boat run you over, I saw the blood in the water.”

“And you left me for dead,” Drummond scolded. “That wasn’t a very nice way to treat your mentor.”

“Oh, yeah. Like the way you watched as those bastards sank my boat? So what is it you’re after this time? Some giant gold Singha? A U-boat full of platinum? Lost Jesuit diamond mines?”

“If you’re here, you must know what’s in these barrels,” Drummond said coyly.

“Surprise me. It’s been the same-old-same-old all day long.”

“Twenty three million dollars in gold.”

A gunshot cracked through the sky, then another: a window on the van exploded.

Nicholas dropped to the snowy ground, almost knocking the wind out of himself. Safety glass from the van’s burst window rained down on him like tiny ice cubes.

“Nicholas!” Maureen shouted from the other side of the van, and between its wheels he could see her murky form wrestling with someone.

From the plane, Drummond bellowed something, but Nicholas’s view was blocked.

He scrambled to his knees next to the van and popped his head around the other side.

“Slam!” Sam Pazzo checked him in the gut with a hockey stick.

Nicholas buckled to the ground, pain like a thumping bass drum in his stomach. Through eyes blurred with tears, he spied Barney scrambling for the bushes. Once again, Nicholas flashed bitterly, he was getting trounced in one of Swires’s fiascoes.

Joey was standing right behind Sam, holding Maureen’s own Glock. He handed a big silver automatic to his brother.

“Fucking nobody fuckin’ move!” Sam shouted, pointing the silver automatic at Nicholas, at where Barney used to be, then at the vacant boat. He was bouncing up and down with agitation, his eyes blazing with hockey fervor.

“Yeah, nobody!” Joey was swirling in circles, pointing the Glock in an even sweep of his entire perimeter. “Sam!”

“What the fuck is it?”

“The dudes on the boat: where’d they go?”

Drummond, Silvi, and del Solar had vanished.

“Who the fuck cares? C’mon!”

Sam led the way as the Pazzos trotted toward the boat.

A loud whine emanated from the seaplane. The propeller started to rotate.

Sam and Joey hopped onto the boat’s gangplank.

Smoke erupted from the engine, and the seaplane roared to life.

A hand darted out of the plane to close the door, but Sam reached out and grabbed it. Drummond spilled out of the plane, on top of Sam and into the boat.

The plane’s engine howled.

Silvi appeared in the doorway, a sawed-off shotgun in her hands. But Joey grabbed the barrel as it went off. The buckshot shattered part of the
Devil Dog
’s railing with a clang. With his other hand Joey gripped her by the coat and yanked. She stumbled and fell to her butt. The shotgun clattered to the pontoon, rolled over, and plopped into the water. Joey tried to climb over her into the plane, and she latched on to his collar. But she wasn’t tussling with any amateur; he coco-nobbied her before she could bashie him. By this time Sam and Drummond were on their feet struggling onto the aircraft’s pontoon as the plane twisted toward the open water.