The Color of Greed (Raja Williams 1) (18 page)

Raja watched as the two got down to business.

“That’s enough for you.” Vinny
turned off the video. “I think you get the point.”

“I think she’s the one getting the
point. Wow. How did Sue get her hands on that?”

“No idea. But, this will break our case wide
open. Bam shizzaam.”

Chapter Thirty-three: Squeeze Play

Early the next morning before Raja had awakened,
Vinny was at her computer sorting through the massive amount of
investment data her search program had uncovered. She had barely
slept at all, but that was never a problem. A new text from Sue Storm
came in on her iPad. This time it was a message giving the name of a
source who had more information on the governor. There was an address
and instructions to meet him there this morning.

Vinny looked at the clock. Raja wouldn’t be up
for hours. She dashed off a note saying she was out following up on a
lead from Sue and pinned it to the coffee machine. That would be the
first place Raja would go when he woke up. Excited to be out on her
own chasing a lead, Vinny pulled out of the Studio City garage in her
BMW and picked up the freeway towards downtown LA.

Fifteen minutes later, Vinny turned down an alley
that matched the address and slowed to a crawl, checking for numbers.
She stopped near the dead end of the alley and got out. After
brushing dirt off of a metal door, she found the number she was
looking for. The rusty padlock and layers of grime said the door
hadn’t been opened in years.

Vinny climbed back into the car to double-check the
address on her iPad, and noticed a garbage truck had pulled into the
alley behind her. Before she could get out to ask the driver to move,
a small metal cylinder sailed through the BMW’s open sunroof
and landed on the seat next to her. As she looked at it, a cloud of
gas softly exploded from the object and quickly filled the cabin. Her
thought,
Get out
, didn’t have time to reach her muscles.

Vinny woke up sitting in the passenger seat of the
BMW she had been driving. She was sure it was daytime, but the car
was in a dark space with very dim light. As she felt around for the
car’s interior light switch, a heavy metal door creaked open
above her and blinding sunlight poured in through the open sunroof.

“Smile for the camera,” said a male
voice coming from a shadow above her. The phone’s video camera
caught her squinting with her mouth open. Then the door slammed shut
again with a metallic clang, bringing darkness. The sound of a heavy
motor starting up echoed in the enclosed space.

The one thing there are too many of in southern
California is automobiles. No one would dream of living there without
a car, or two or three. But what do you do with them when they are
old and no longer used? The automobile junk industry has made an art
form of crunching a car down into a surprisingly small cube for
disposal or recycling.

Vinny flipped on the interior light and looked out
through the windshield. A heavy metal piston rumbled slowly toward
the car.

“O-M-G,” she said softly. Then she
screamed.

Chapter Thirty-four: Special Delivery

Sue Storm was determined to remain alive. She
insisted on taking what might be considered extreme cloak-and-dagger
precautions. However, in light of the body count, Raja couldn’t
find fault with her caution. Once making initial contact with Raja,
she had a list of addresses couriered to him by hand. The list
consisted of addresses near payphones at random locations in the
city. Each address had a letter assigned and a time of day. When she
wanted to speak to him she would call his phone and leave a letter
and date. If Raja could rendezvous he would return the call and leave
no message. Then he would be there at the designated time, and wait
for her call on the payphone, which she made from another
unregistered phone.

That is why Raja stood in the hot sun a hundred feet
from the El Pollo Loco on the corner of Broadway and Third at quarter
to one in the afternoon. It was the address of a flower shop called
Basic Flowers. Out in front was a rare working payphone. Raja waited
for fifteen minutes, and at exactly one o’clock the payphone
rang.

Sue had insisted on no one using her name on the
phone.

“Hello, Fran,” said Raja. It was his
sister’s name. He felt idiotic, but if it put Sue at ease, he
was willing to play along. After all, Sue had broken their case wide
open.

“Hey,” was all the greeting Sue offered.

“How are you doing?” asked Raja. He knew
how isolated Sue felt, and tried to provide some human contact.

“It’s no vacation—unless you want
to call it a vacation from my life. Talk about life interrupted. I
always wondered what it must be like in the witness protection
program. Horrible. I could go on, but enough about me. I wanted to
give you some background on the Solarman story.”

“Before you do, I wanted to thank you for the
file—it has been a goldmine. And thanks for the lead you sent
Vinny.”

“What lead?” asked Sue.

“The address you sent Vinny.”

“What address?”

“Hold on.” Raja hit the call waiting
button. As soon as he got a dial tone, he punched the 2 on the speed
dial for Vinny. It rang so slowly. “Come on, come on,” he
said, willing her to answer. When the call finally went to voice
mail, the back of his head was already throbbing. “Vinny. Raja.
Call me now.”

Switching back to Sue, he said, “We better
talk later.”

“Is everything okay?”

“I’m sure it is. I need to check on a
few things. But, I would keep your head down and be on alert for the
time being.”

“You’re preaching to the choir.”

“Yeah, I forgot who I was talking to.”
Raja was already extrapolating every scenario he could on Vinny. Not
one had a happy ending. “I gotta go,” he said, and hung
up abruptly.

Raja tried calling everyone he could think of who
might know where Vinny was. No one had seen or heard from her.
Despite Vinny’s natural economy with words and her whimsical
nature, it wasn’t like her to leave Raja hanging this long,
especially in the middle of a case. Once she had gone on an impromptu
skiing trip with the men’s U.S. Olympic team, yet she had
called Raja from the lodge in Aspen to let him know where she was.
She knew how protective he was and how much he worried. After Vinny
had been incommunicado for more than three hours, it was time to
panic.

Raja raced home to the loft in Studio City. He tried
Vinny four times during the drive, with no luck. Now he stood in
front of the glass computer screen, unable to locate the address
Vinny had found. It had to be there somewhere. Nothing on the
desktop. She was very organized. He sometimes teased her about it,
but now he hoped she had taken the time to record the data from her
phone. He searched for folders on their case, finding one titled
“leads.” Inside it he found a document marked with
today’s date.

Before he could open it, his phone rang. The
loudness startled him. The caller ID said C&F, Inc.

“Who is this?” asked Raja, suspiciously.

After pulling into the garage of Raja’s
building, the truck driver had called the number on the invoice as
instructed.

“Craters and Freighters special delivery
service. I’ve got a package for Raja Williams. It’s a
heavy one. Heaviest I’ve ever seen. I’m going to need you
to sign. Down here, in the garage.”

Raja drummed the railing in the elevator impatiently
as it slowly descended to the parking garage. He raced to the truck
where the driver was backing out a forklift that was straining under
its load.

“Where do want this?”

“Over there,” said Raja, pointing to a
parking spot.

The forklift nearly tipped over. When the driver set
the crate down, a hollow thud echoed through the garage. The
vibration it made ran through the concrete floor and up into Raja’s
body like an electric shock. His head was throbbing fiercely.

“Oh, this came with it,” said the
driver. He shoved a small package the size of a ring box into Raja’s
hand. “Sign here,” said the driver, indifferently. “What
is that thing?” he added, looking at the crate.

Raja scribbled on the invoice, ignoring the question
and never taking his eyes off the four-foot-square crate. Before the
driver had left the garage, he pulled at the wood with his bare
hands, tearing chunks of wood from the crate. Inside was a package
covered with festive gift-wrapping paper. The pattern was clowns and
balloons.

After ripping off the paper, he saw that the compact
block of twisted metal and plastic was a crushed car. Raja leaned
close to inspect a piece of sheet metal. Recognition of the titanium
silver paint from Vinny’s BMW X6 buckled his knees, knotted his
stomach and closed his throat.

He remembered the small box in his right hand and
stared at it blankly. Opening the top revealed a small flashdrive. He
raced back up to the loft and searched frantically on Vinny’s
computer setup for a place to plug it in. Finding a slot on the edge
of the screen, he snapped the flashdrive into place. A disc spun on
the screen as the drive opened automatically.

A brief video clip showed Vinny inside the BMW
looking up, after which the image jerked around a few seconds and
then restarted, now focused on a junkyard compacter as it crushed the
car inside. Raja could hear glass shattering and metal popping as the
machine collapsed the car. Then nothing. The pulsing surge of blood
in his temples made Raja’s eyes tear up.

Chapter Thirty-five: All Points Bulletin

After getting the address from Raja, Detective
Rafferty sent a squad to check what turned out to be a bogus address
at the dead end of an isolated alley in a rundown area of Vernon, a
warehouse district in Greater Los Angeles. Most of the buildings
there were unoccupied, making it the perfect spot for an abduction
with no witnesses.

Every cop in southern California was on high alert
for Vinny. The news ran her picture on every local station. If her
face showed up anywhere, someone would surely spot her. No one said
what everyone was thinking—everyone but Raja—that Vinny
was already dead. Despite that, they kept looking. When you have lost
hope, you go through the motions and do everything you can because,
in some perverse way, when the inevitable end comes, you feel better
saying you did everything you could.

Sharon Becker had her forensic team studying the
twisted hunk of metal and plastic in Raja’s garage, hunting for
any evidence of Vinny on the two-ton cube. There was no sign of blood
or DNA on the surfaces, but either might have been trapped inside due
to the compressed state the car was in. X-rays were no help through
such a tangled mess of steel. Pulling the compacted car apart was the
only option. Sharon brought in metal presses and acetylene torches
from a local machine shop to pry and cut the block open.

Raja couldn’t bear to watch. He decided to pay
someone a visit.

Chapter Thirty-six: Mad As Hell

Upstairs in the loft, Raja searched the computer. He
remembered Vinny had told him the governor was staying in LA for the
opening and dedication of a new stadium.
Where the hell is that
address?
he thought. Raja opened files until the screen was
nearly covered. There. The Millennium Biltmore in downtown LA. That’s
where the governor would be.

In ten minutes Raja was on the road, pushing the
Ferrari hard. His head throbbed and that only made him more furious.
Raja was lucky not to get pulled over, but he didn’t care. It
might be better if he did get stopped. He had no idea what he would
do when he got there, but he couldn’t let it go.

Raja drove straight into the Biltmore Hotel entrance
and screeched to a stop in the valet drop off, ignoring the valet’s
attempt to get his attention on his way into the lobby. He scanned
carefully until he spotted a couple well-dressed security types
walking into the elevator. They had to be with the governor. He knew
the hotel staff wouldn’t tell him anything, so he watched until
he saw the elevator stop on the number 8. He stepped into a second
car and punched 8. Sure enough, as he got out on the 8th floor, the
two security men were just entering a suite. They were changing
shifts. His timing was perfect. Without knocking, he walked right
into the suite. Once inside he called loudly, “Governor Black,
where are you? It’s Raja Williams.”

Three security men drew their guns and trained them
on Raja.

Raja kept his hands up where they could be seen.
“I’m unarmed,” he said, to keep from getting shot.
“Come out and face me, you coward.”

The door to a bedroom opened.

“Get back, sir,” ordered the fourth
security guard, trying to push the governor back into the bedroom.

“That’s all right, son. Let me be,”
said the governor. “I don’t know what you think you are
doing, Mr. Williams.”

“I’m giving you a chance to do the right
thing. If anything happens to her I will kill you myself,” said
Raja.

“Who?”

“You know who.”

“I don’t know what you are talking
about, but you better watch what you say,” said the governor.

That was all Raja could take. He rushed forward,
only to be tasered by one of the guards. Raja flopped helplessly, and
then lay still.

“Get him out of here,” said the
governor. “And call the police. I want that man arrested.”

Two security men handcuffed Raja and dragged him
roughly out of the governor’s suite.

Chapter Thirty-seven: Slim Is Better Than None

After spending five excruciating hours in the LA
County jail, Raja heard a familiar voice.

“How do you like our accommodations?” It
was Detective Rafferty.

“What about Vinny?” asked Raja. He could
think of nothing else.

“Still nothing definite.”