Rivers of Gold (32 page)

The range master came out as he was clipping up his third target and asked if he was married to the Glock.

“What else you got?” Santiago asked.

He spent the rest of the afternoon firing .45s of all shapes and sizes. The venerable M1911 was great for range, but it proved bulky in a shoulder rig and slow on the draw. Glocks were too light. Compact colts and S&Ws appealed to him, even with the .45 ACP round's added kick, but only one of the pistols he fired felt right in his hand.

Going on five
P.M.
that day, he burned some of his savings on an online order for a Springfield XD .45 compact with an accessory rail for a light/laser attachment and a Galco shoulder rig with provision for extra clips.

Back in his apartment, showered and shaved, Santiago strapped on More's Glock and sent a single text message.

Then he went home.

Back to Inwood. Back to the wooden-slat rumble of the Number 1 train above the seedy bars on Nagle Avenue. Back to the cell phone and barber shops along West 207th Street. Past his father's shop and home. Luis had made a haul. There was fresh striper and porgy and cod, and shrimp and calamari and mussels, and fresh cilantro and onions and tomatoes. His siblings were there, and their significant others, and Santiago was the only single one at the table. But it wasn't so bad. He was used to it.

The only awkward moment came when his asshole brother Rafa had started running his mouth about the big shootout under the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown, and how it was probably a drug thing. Probably junkies. Probably on that new
paco
shit. Probably.

Santiago wasn't aware he had been staring until Esperanza gently touched his arm. Victor scowled. Santiago's mother said he looked just like one of the fish Luis had delivered. Santiago lowered his eyes and said nothing.

After dinner, while others overindulged with flan and rum, Santiago, strong coffee in hand, braved the noxious cigar smoke the males in his family were generating by the windows to check his messages.

The text he'd sent earlier read:
TONIGHT. MY PLACE. MIDNIGHT. SAY YES
. The reply was one word:
YES
.

As he made his good-byes, his sister surreptitiously asked if he'd talked to McKeutchen about More. Victor was less encumbered: “You still working with the crazy fuck?”

“I don't know,” Santiago had replied, and for the first time in days, he felt like he was being completely honest. It helped.

He'd gotten back to Long Island City just in time to light the candles, set out a portion of his mother's homemade crab cakes, and make sure the bathroom was in order before the buzzer rang.

When he opened the door, Yersinia was leaning on the jamb wearing a belted trenchcoat like Columbo. She held out a foil-wrapped bottle. “For wrapping up the big case.” She declined his offer to take her coat.

He went to work on the bottle. Porfirio Plata, the good stuff. “How do you take it?” he asked over his shoulder.

No response. Yersinia was a pest.

He turned. Yersinia was standing in the living room with her arms crossed, looking at the four huge photos of the Mall in Central Park that Santiago had liberated from the kid's apartment. She had shed her coat and wore only a silver belly chain.

“Well?” she asked over her shoulder. “Aren't you going to bring me my drink?”

It's fun to be right, Santiago thought as he cracked the seal.

THE WALL STREET JOURNAL ONLINE

(FOR SUBSCRIBERS ONLY!)

MONDAY, JUNE 27, 2013

Century Club Raid Uncovers Crime Ring

True Apothecary Fund head linked to chain of criminal enterprises, including swank Century Club, brothel, and the new notorious “speaks”

BY RONNEY RADIANT

NEW YORK—A joint Federal-NYPD task force conducted a sweeping series of raids last week on the Century Club, long touted as a lone success in today's downtrodden restaurant market, as well as a series of other private ventures around New York City, including a brothel, a copy shop, and a taxi garage, not to mention one of the highest-profile investment funds under the ever-expanding aegis of
Urbank
.

The raids have ensnared a bizarre mix of suspects, including the head of Urbank's
True Apothecary Fund
, Mark Shewkesbury; several Polish nationals believed to be enforcers for a multinational crime ring; at least one unnamed employee of the posh Century Club in Chelsea; a string of suspects believed to be part of an Upper West Side brothel; and an unknown number of cabdrivers, at least two of whom are connected with the Sunshine Taxi Corporation in Queens, according to unnamed sources. The cabdrivers are suspected of serving a network of illegal club-type parties, modeled after the illegal supper clubs that have sprung up around the city following an unprecedented wave of restaurant failures. Unlike the supper clubs, however, the nightclubs, or “speaks” as they are colloquially known, have nurtured a flourishing trade in illegal bar operations, drugs, and prostitution.

The violence that has simmered beneath the surface of this underground trade has now exploded with lethal force. Three cabdrivers have been murdered within the past month, for reasons yet unknown. Following the huge cabdriver protest last week, which immobilized city traffic for hours, came the bloody shootout beneath the Manhattan Bridge in Chinatown on June 21. Eyewitnesses put a taxicab at the scene, which was later identified as belonging to the NYPD's new Citywide Anticrime Bureau (CAB), which uses taxicabs as undercover police cars.

In a near-simultaneous (though possibly unrelated) incident, other officers from the Citywide Anticrime Bureau raided the offices of
Roundup
magazine after its editor in chief, Marcus Chalk, had been reported missing for several days, and after a surprise government audit turned up large deficits listed as “off balance sheet expenses.”

A spokesman for
Roundup
's parent company,
Malignant Media
Inc., could not be reached for comment. Calls to the office of Malignant Media's board chairman, pesticide tycoon Hugo Mugo, were not returned.

While the raids on the Century Club and the brothel (known commercially as Bacchanal Industries), and Shewkesbury's arrest, stem from a long-standing Treasury/FBI investigation, it is unknown what triggered the raids on
Roundup
, the Chelsea copy shop (the name of which is being withheld pending further investigation), or the Sunshine Taxi Corporation in Queens. Both the FBI and the Treasury Department declined to comment.

The Polish nationals arrested in Chinatown following the shootout beneath the bridge, whose identities have yet to be released, also turn up in the books of the copy shop. It is unclear whether these men have any connection to the brothel, the True Apothecary Fund, or
Roundup
magazine. There was no information available on the status of the Polish gunmen. Calls to the Polish embassy were not returned.

Sixteen people and an unknown amount of narcotics and other contraband were seized in the raid on Bacchanal Industries, which operated out of a brownstone on West Eighty-third Street near Central Park. No further information is available.

Nor is there any further information on the shooting under the bridge, which one onlooker described as “a m———g war zone.” The onlooker, who asked not to be identified, described the scene as “f———g disgusting” and “a s———d of blood.”

The NYPD said a statement on the status of the cases was pending. City Hall spokeswoman Tsetse Fly said the mayor was “deeply troubled” by the raids and was withholding comment until “all the facts are in.”

On the taxi front, Baijanti Divya, executive director for the Taxicab Workers Association, the de facto cabdrivers' union, stated: “I hope these sad events focus public attention on the plight of New York City cabdrivers, three of whom have been brutally murdered within the past month. Surely the TLC and City Hall don't want more protests like the one we staged last week, which stopped
all taxi traffic for six hours, to happen again. I call upon Mayor Baumgarten and the TLC to adopt stricter driver-security measures and better NYPD protection for New York City cabdrivers.”

Calls to the TLC were not returned.

Detective (Second Grade) Sixto Fortunato Santiago put down his phone and shifted gingerly in his chair so as not to aggravate his bruised ribs. He did so favoring his right leg, keeping pressure off his sprained left ankle. There was a dark knot on his forehead between his eyes, as though he'd been struck with a hammer. He carefully put his mug to his mouth, keeping the hot coffee well clear of the stitches inside his lower lip. Yersinia had ravaged him. He felt lucky to be alive.

“Santiago, line two,” Liesl called out morosely. He and Turse were inconsolable. Their big roll-up had hit the wall when NYPD divers had fished out a corpse from the riverbed off Roosevelt Island. The corpse had a wallet and ID belonging to one William Rochester, a Brit. His wrists and ankles had been bound with piano wire, cruciform-style, to a sewage dredge, which had been floated out to the middle of the river and sunk in sixty feet of water in the center of the city's wave-turbine field.

A holdover from the earlier days of better-funded green energy projects, the wave-turbine program had been resuscitated by Mayor Baumgarten after its initial failure in '06. It was now generating enough electricity from the East River currents to light twenty thousand homes in Queens, one small victory for the beleaguered administration.

But someone had used it to send a different kind of signal. Rochester's body had been carefully arranged so that the vanes of one of the turbines would collide with its head on each revolution. Ponk, ponk, ponk, Rochester's skull was batted by the slow-moving blades, the flesh of the neck slowly splitting from the shoulders, for however many days he'd been down there, only the ME would know for sure. The head had finally separated from the corpse when the divers brought it to the surface.

Now the Narc Sharks had a hole in their chart for the middle management of the organization they'd titled Cabs, Clubs, and Cooze. The cabbies' lawyers had done a surprisingly good job protecting their clients, who in any case didn't know anything about the upper echelons—well, that was their story, anyway, and they stuck to it. There was only one other suspect the Narc Sharks could question.

“Can we see him
today
?” Turse whined.

Santiago shook his head. He had warned McKeutchen that if the Narc Sharks or any other investigator braced the kid before his hospital release, he would kill them. Renny was making slow but steady progress. He was off the bedpan now, but still struggling to regain full bowel control. McKeutchen had visited him several times. After the last trip, he'd reported to Santiago that they'd had a detailed discussion on fighting the effects of diarrheal chapping. McKeutchen had suggested cortisone and Tucks, the kid had countered with wet wipes and Aquaphor. It was a textbook case of old school meeting new.

McKeutchen was working his magic to help out with the kid's medical bills, since the mother obviously didn't have much, although she dragged herself to the hospital every day to hold Renny's hand and stroke his hair when the nightmares brought him screaming out of what little sleep Dr. Lopez could provide. They were doing all they could, McKeutchen assured him. Santiago stared out the window and said nothing.

He did that more often these days, thinking back over the case and how it'd played out. Without More around, there wasn't much for him to do, as he was confined to desk duty until the shooting under the bridge was resolved. IAB seemed more than willing to clear things, but it was taking longer with the Feds involved. Plus, someone in the ME's office had been making a stink about the condition of the dead suspect's body indicating a level of ordnance far more powerful than the standard arsenal of the NYPD, even that of ESU. He was asking for detailed ballistics reports on the weapons used on the night of the shooting. McKeutchen said he was on it, not to worry.

There was an e-mail message on his phone from Lina. It read:
Y'S BEEN WALKING AROUND SMILING AND BEING NICE TO EVERYONE AND BUMPING INTO THINGS ALL DAY. THE NEXT TIME YOU GET PROMOTED, CALL ME
! Her sig file photo was a baby seal, sound asleep.

There'd been no further word from nor about More, and nothing from Devius Rune. Santiago'd looked up the document Rune had mentioned, Department of Defense Directive 5525.5, and had found it interesting reading indeed, not least because it was much older than he'd thought, going back to 1986. The directive was almost as old as he was. Maybe it'd been a Cold War thing, set guys like More loose at home to smoke out some KGB mole or something.

Or maybe it wasn't about enemies from overseas at all anymore. Maybe McKeutchen was right; sometimes you had to break the law in order to maintain it. Santiago didn't know, and he didn't like not knowing. He stared hollow-eyed out the window. He'd dropped almost fifteen pounds since that night under the bridge. At dinner, his sister had said he looked svelte. His mother had said he looked sick.

He remembered the phone. An Inspector Sigurdardottir from Interpol was on the line. Dimly Santiago listened to him describe, in better English than his own, human remains recovered by the Dutch police from a trap in a hydroelectric plant outside Rotterdam. DNA testing had identified the remains as belonging to a Reza Varna, a high-priority suspect in a large interagency investigation centered in New York. The Dutch cops figured Varna had gone into the sluice about a quarter-mile above the trap, which was made of strands of ultrathin high-tensile steel wires. The effect was similar to being slowly driven (by several hundred thousand tons of water pressure) face-first through a giant potato masher. Preliminary forensics indicated the victim had been alive, perhaps even conscious, when he'd gone into the sluice.