Gamma Blade Read online

  He had new responsibilities.

  And damn, if that didn’t feel good.

  *

  As a delegate to the AMA conference, Beth had gotten a discounted booking in the very hotel in which the conference was taking place. Venn stepped out of the elevator into the lobby and stared around him. Like most of the walls, the high, domed ceiling was made of glass, towering above a plush reception area crowded with people who looked to Venn like medical professionals. An intricate ocean-themed mosaic dominated the floor space. Potted palms, beautifully tended, lended a subtle impression of a treasure-laden cave deep in some tropical jungle.

  It was the kind of five-star place Venn had visited often enough while pursuing a case, but had never actually stayed at himself.

  “Beth!” cried a bespectacled, middle-aged man who was part of a knot of people congregating near the reception desk, and she trotted over to him and hugged him. Venn recognized him vaguely as a doctor at Revere whom he’d met at some social gathering or other back in New York.

  He watched Beth chatting with her colleagues, and felt a sense of warm pride and satisfaction wash across him. Three years ago, his life had been on the skids. He’d been a private eye in downtown Manhattan, living from hand to mouth, a veteran of the US Marine Corps and a disgraced cop with his law-enforcement career seemingly a thing of the past. He’d been alone, and jaded, and life had looked pretty damned pointless.

  Then Beth came along, and everything had changed. Granted, they’d been thrown together in the most frightening of circumstances, with her on the run from a hired assassin and Venn trying to escape a murder charge for which he’d been set up. They’d had their ups and downs since then, he and Beth, with a short-lived but horrible period of separation last fall when he’d thought he’d lost her forever.

  But now here he was, engaged to be married to this beautiful, brainy, feisty girl who was carrying their baby, and who was rocketing ahead in a career she loved. And Venn himself was doing work he got a kick out of, with a bunch of staff he genuinely liked, to a man (and woman).

  And he was in Miami for an extended weekend, in a swanky hotel, with the spring sunshine blazing outside and the prospect of a good meal tonight and a lazy day tomorrow, noodling around the city while Beth attended the various talks and seminars at the conference. He’d check out the marina, maybe chat to a couple of the yacht owners about their rigs. Take a browse through a bookstore or two. Buy himself an ice cream and wander down to the beach, dip his toes in the sea.

  Life was a four-lane highway stretching to the horizon and beyond, with nothing blocking the way.

  Later, after it all happened, Venn would recall how he’d felt at that moment in the hotel lobby. Recall it, and marvel at how things could turn on a dime.

  Chapter 3

  The guy was a fat, balding grocery store owner named Carlos Fuentes, and the most noteworthy thing about him was the fact that he’d pissed his pants.

  Brull stared at the dark stain at the front of the man’s slacks.

  He allowed his gaze to linger long enough that Fuentes began to squirm in shame rather than just fear.

  Two of Brull’s men, Elon and Pedro, held the guy by his arms. One of them alone could have kept him prisoner, easily. But the presence of two of them ramped up the terror factor.

  Ernesto Justice Brull was seated behind his desk in the small office he rented in south Miami. The office was where he conducted a small part of his business, most of his interactions taking place on the street. More importantly, the office served as an address for tax and other legal purposes. It was nominally the premises of the Columbus Employment Agency, a front business which Brull had set up seven years earlier. The agency’s finances were in tip-top shape, every penny of the laundered money that passed through it accounted for, every inch of its neatly furnished quarters meeting the requirements of both Federal and State sanitation and safety legislative diktat.

  At last, Brull raised his eyes from the man’s crotch to his face. Fuentes’ eyes were like dull bluish eggs swimming above the pouchy lower lids. The mouth was a wide rictus of terror. Under the weak chin, his throat was speckled with gray stubble, like blackheads on a wino’s nose.

  Brull thought: Disgusting.

  It was his opinion that a man who didn’t have a beard, yet couldn’t take the trouble to shave in the morning, was as low as a pig.

  Brull himself sported a fastidiously groomed mustache and thin jawline strip of beard, with carefully sculpted parallel trails connecting the two. He didn’t like hair much. Didn’t like it in his women, certainly, except on their heads, which was why he insisted on complete denudation elsewhere. He himself shaved his head. He stipulated that all his male employees do the same.

  But facial hair, well-tended and tasteful, was the mark of a man. Brull allowed it.

  The grunting, sweating pig, Fuentes, staggered before his desk. If Elon and Pedro hadn’t held his arms, he’d have collapsed onto the carpet. His slack, repulsive mouth, with its flailing tongue and shitty yellow teeth, spewed drool on the edge of Brull’s desk.

  Brull ignored it, even though his skin crawled, and even while his mind calculated how often he’d need to wipe the wood before he was satisfied the contamination was gone.

  Twenty times, he decided.

  He folded his hands on the leather desktop and smiled ruefully and said: “You’ve been a naughty boy, Carlos.”

  Fuentes released an explosion of words in Spanish. Brull held up a hand, turning his head away.

  Pedro slapped the side of the fat man’s head, rocking it back.

  Brull said, “Please, Carlos. You know my rule. This is America. English only. ”

  Fuentes looked dazed. He peered at Brull, trying to regain his focus. Brull nodded encouragement.

  Fuentes said, “Please, Mr Brull. I pay you nex’ week. Four days, most. Tuesday. No later.”

  Inwardly, Brull recoiled. The man’s accent was atrocious. He’d been living in Miami for probably a quarter century. Yet, despite all of the opportunities the United States had given him, he hadn’t bothered to perfect the lingua franca.

  He made Brull ashamed to be a Cuban.

  Brull said, still in the same affable tone: “The problem we have, Carlos, is that I needed four thousand dollars today. May twenty-second. Not next week. Not Tuesday, or even tomorrow.”

  “Nex’ week! Nex’ week!” Fuentes began to blubber. “Monday! Monday morning you have the money! Please, Mr Brull! I -”

  “Okay,” said Brull, quietly. “Monday morning. I’ll allow that. Shall we say nine a.m.? Give you a chance to have a good night’s sleep before. And let’s make it six thousand. Because I’m a reasonable man, and I believe in giving a hardworking small business owner a break.”

  In the few seconds’ silence that followed, Brull could have sworn that Fuentes’ eyes swiveled through three hundred and sixty degrees in his head.

  “Six thousand?” The man’s voice cracked. “Six? Mr Brull, I cannot -”

  Pedro slapped him upside his head again. A flick of blood from Fuentes’ mouth lanced onto the carpet. Brull winced.

  “There’s no need for that,” he chided.

  He stood up. On the other side of the desk, Fuentes recoiled.

  “Relax, Carlos.” Brull patted his hands in the air, palms down. “I’ve stated my terms. There’s no need to worry. I’m not going to hurt you. You can go now.”

  Fuentes’ eyes stopped roving. He watched Brull, like a caged animal anticipating a sudden trick.

  Brull nodded briefly to Elon and Pedro. They released the man’s arms. Fuentes lurched, but held his feet.

  He stared up at Brull through his rheumy eyes.

  Brull spread his hands.

  “Carlos, man. You’re free to go. No games. Just walk out that door, and I’ll see you Monday morning.”

  The man’s shirt was untucked at the back, his gait was awkward because of his urine-sodden pants, and his sparse hair was in disarray. But, after a
quick glance at Elon and Pedro, he turned and began to stumble toward the door of the office.

  Brull gazed at Fuentes’ back. He didn’t smile. He reached for the cell phone on the desk in front of him and thumbed it on and sent the text message he’d prepared earlier.

  However desperate Fuentes was to get away from the office, to put as much distance as he could between him and his tormentors, he couldn’t help but reach instinctively for the phone in his pocket as it emitted the familiar ting of an arriving message.

  He paused, halfway through the door, and stared at his phone.

  Brull watched his motionless, ungainly form.

  The seconds passed.

  Two.

  Three.

  Fuentes began to shake. It wasn’t the hand tremor of nervousness. Rather, it was the full-body convulsion of a man wracked by abject, unremitting terror.

  One word escaped his mouth: “No.”

  He turned, staggering as he did so. Now, Brull thought, his saucer-like eyes didn’t resemble those of a caged animal so much as those of a man who’d just gazed into the pit of hell itself.

  The text Brull had sent contained no words. Just a short, five-second video clip.

  Brull had memorized the clip, frame by frame. It showed a little boy, seven years old. Ordinarily he would have been cute, with his chubby cheeks and cowlick hair. But in the clip, his angelic features were distorted in a terrible howling rictus of fear and despair.

  There was no pain in the child’s face.

  Not... yet.

  Fuentes’ jaw was working, but no sound came from his mouth. He resembled to Brull a marionette, one wielded by an inexperienced puppeteer.

  Brull said, in a tone of serene reasonableness: “Like I said, Carlos, I’m not going to hurt you.” He glanced at the clock on the wall. “I tell you what. Let’s make it ten a.m. on Monday. An hour extra. Since I’m in a pretty fuckin’ positive mood today.”

  He beamed. He had a way of doing it that ensured the light flashed off the diamond crucifix embedded in his left upper canine. He knew such an adornment was regarded as a cliché by some, which was why he sported it. It was a kind of ironic statement, a massive screw you to anybody who might make the mistake of taking Brull for a lightweight, a mere wannabe gangbanger.

  South Miami was his turf now. His.

  Ernesto Justice Brull’s.

  EJ’s.

  *

  Brull had worked his way up through the ranks of the city’s Cuban underworld doing the usual things: protection money collection, a little extortion here and there, a modicum of loan sharking. Sure, he’d gone along on a robbery or two, a couple of burglaries, but from the outset he’d distanced himself from the grunt work, the kind of stuff which often ended up in a shootout with the cops.

  From the beginning, Brull had seen himself as a boss. And bosses knew when to delegate. Knew when their skills were better employed working things behind the scenes, rather than putting themselves in the line of fire.

  When he’d at last branched out, and put together his own business, seven years ago, Brull had made a conscious decision not to follow the herd. Not to compete in the crowded marketplaces of gun-running and narcotics-pushing and the shaking down of local minor politicians. That kind of thing was for the mediocre. The unimaginative.

  The small-thinkers, destined forever to be footnotes in the history of the Miami underground entrepreneurial sector.

  Instead, Brull had begun building up his own unique operation. One which took years of exquisite, painstaking planning. One which hadn’t yielded immediate dividends, because he’d never expected it to.

  Like a fine Bordeaux, his operation had matured over more than half a decade. Been carefully nurtured, kept in the right conditions and allowed to ripen, when other, more impetuous men would have cracked it open earlier and derived some pleasure from it, while squandering its potential.

  At last, three summers ago, his business had started to turn a serious profit, and Ernesto Justice Brull had finally, fully arrived.

  The other players on the Miami scene had tried to muscle in, of course. His particular niche was an underexploited one, and his business rivals had been quick to see the potential in it. Brull had been equally quick to show them, in no uncertain terms, that he wasn’t going to tolerate competition, at least not in this endeavour. He’d responded with maximum, wholly disproportionate force, and the city had seemed on the verge of all-out war when the other bosses had decided against letting everything go up in flames and had, grudgingly, conceded that Brull was the master of this particular game. They’d left him alone since then.

  But Brull knew he could never, ever let his guard down. And so he displayed his unflinching authority at every turn, knowing that, according the principle of zero tolerance which had been employed so effectively by the New York Police Department in the 1990s, there could be no such thing as a minor offense, no transgression that could be declared too petty to be worth bothering about.

  Which was why, when Carlos Fuentes, the grocery store owner, was unable to come up with the four thousand dollars he owed Brull, it was to be viewed as a matter as serious as if Fuentes had insulted the memory of Brull’s mother.

  You tore up the weeds as soon as they first poked their shoots up through the cracks between your driveway’s paving stones, because if you didn’t, they were apt to form a network which would eventually undermine the foundations of your house.

  *

  Elon and Pedro ‘escorted’ Fuentes from Brull’s office, which meant they strong-armed him down the stairs and threw him headfirst through the door and onto the sidewalk.

  They reappeared a minute later.

  Elon said: “You want we should kill the kid now?”

  Brull thought about it. The kid would die, of course. Fuentes hadn’t yet been punished for failing to deliver the four grand on time. But he might play hardball - it was highly unlikely, but possible - and so Brull needed the boy alive as leverage.

  “No,” he said. “Once we get the money, then you waste him.”

  “Fuentes, too?” asked Pedro.

  Brull stared at him, appalled.

  “You nuts? No. Fuentes stays alive. He needs to suffer. And to spread the word, about what happens to guys who don’t pony up on time.” Brull shook his head. “Pedro, I swear, when the good Lord made you he got so carried away with all the muscles - and the dick, if what I’ve heard is true - that he ran short when it came to brains.”

  “Sorry, EJ,” said Pedro. He didn’t sound sorry at all. None of Brull’s senior guys were grovelers. Brull didn’t care for fawning yes-men, and those who tried to suck up to him found themselves swiftly unemployed, or sometimes worse.

  Brull checked his watch. It was a fine specimen, a Patek Philippe, and Brull had bought it for himself as a reward when he’d made his first ten-thousand-dollar deal. That had been three years ago. Now, ten grand was chickenfeed.

  It was three fifteen in the afternoon.

  “Take off, guys.” He nodded at Elon and Pedro. “Get some down time. Make sure you’re fresh for tonight.”

  They acknowledged him with a bow of the head each, and left the office.

  Brull sat alone, listening to the sounds of the city beyond the double-glazed windows. Tonight was going to need fresh men, that was for sure.

  It wasn’t the biggest meeting Brull had ever attended. But it would be one of the most crucial. And the potential for double cross was great.

  Yet, if it went according to plan, it would end up netting Brull and his organization the biggest haul in their short history.

  Brull got up after a few minutes. He made sure his cell phone was switched off, and the phone on his desk was unplugged. He locked the door to the office.

  Before his desk was a rug, worn threadbare from countless pairs of feet. And knees. Sometimes Brull thought it would be good to get that rug replaced, maybe with one of the fine handwoven Moroccan ones he had at his home. But the office was a front, of course,
and any overt display of wealth or even good taste might attract suspicion.

  Besides, he liked the existing rug. It was an emblem of his success. Blood had been spilled on that rug, and men had groveled there before him in supplication.

  Now, he eased himself into the lotus position. He’d taken up yoga years ago, and was astonished and delighted by the way it relaxed him, helped him empty his mind of all worries and fears and concentrate simply on being.

  His eyes closed, Ernesto Justice Brull allowed peace to soak him in its soothing balm.

  Chapter 4

  Beth’s face appeared beside Venn’s in the mirror. He was stooping a little, to allow himself to examine his reflection, and it put him on a level with her.

  “My,” she murmured. “Lieutenant Joe Venn. You do look dapper.”

  Venn tried on a playful scowl. But he had to admit, she was right.

  He did look sharp.

  Venn had never been a fashion hound, and would be the first to admit it. He couldn’t understand the obsession most people seemed to have with clothes. To him, clothes were something that protected you from the elements, or, in the case of uniforms, identified your job easily for people. Wearing them to make a statement, or to feel good about yourself, had always seemed to him to be narcissistic in the extreme. So all he needed was a pair of jeans or chinos, a plain shirt, and one of his trusty leather jackets. Nothing more.

  Tonight, though, he’d gone the full nine yards. He was wearing a navy Brooks Brothers suit which Beth had gotten for him last Christmas and which he’d worn exactly once before - when he’d tried it on for size - as well as a cream-colored shirt from Calvin Klein, also provided by Beth, topped off with a red silk necktie. His shoes, which he hadn’t yet put on, were brown Italian loafers, quite unlike the boots he was used to.

  Venn felt awkward, and acutely self-conscious.

  But he thought it all hung together okay.

  Beth hadn’t asked him to dress up, but he’d decided to do so spontaneously, and he could see from her expression that she was both surprised and delighted. She was attending the keynote address which kicked off the AMA conference. Venn wasn’t coming along - even if he’d been on the delegate list, he’d have been utterly lost among all the medics in the audience, and wouldn’t have been able to fathom what the professor delivering the address was saying - but he had been invited to the meal afterward. He figured many of the other people at the dinner would have spouses or significant others present who, like Venn, weren’t in the medical field, and there were sure to be a few of them he could find common ground with. Maybe even a cop or two.