Deadly in New York Page 5

  Flaherty had quickly sniffed out Hawker’s careful plans.

  He could have sent Hawker to the pen for life.

  Instead, Flaherty had stepped back and let him do the important dirty work and then suggested in that sly, wry brogue of his that Hawker might do well to leave L.A. before a certain Irish detective was forced to do his duty.

  Hawker didn’t need to be told twice.

  Flaherty had impressed the hell out of him.

  As Callis drove, Hawker shifted uncomfortably in his handcuffs. He wondered how much Flaherty had told Callis. More important, he wondered how Callis had reacted to it. Hawker knew it would be the difference between continuing his work and probably a congressional investigation.

  “What got Flaherty talking about me?” Hawker asked carefully.

  Callis eyed him shrewdly. “He told me what you did in L.A.”

  “I did a lot of things in California,” Hawker said evasively.

  “Yeah, well, I guess you’d remember this. Flaherty said you were a one-man army. Said he’d never seen anything like it. He said you wasted about twenty street-gang members and completely destroyed their organization.”

  “He said that, did he?” said Hawker. “Jeeze, the guy really has an imagination.”

  “I don’t think imagination has anything to do with it,” Callis countered. “Flaherty told me not to be surprised if you turned up in New York one day. That little spud-face said he had ‘deduced’ that you had some big money behind you and one hell of a lot of motivation.”

  “Is that all he said?”

  Callis dropped every pretense in his voice. “No. He also said that he trusted you and he trusted your judgment. He said that, if I was smart, I’d help you if I ever got the opportunity.”

  Hawker relaxed a little bit. “And that’s why you charged me with murder one?”

  “That’s right. The way you needled O’Connor and Davis really put you on their shit list. They would have been suspicious if I hadn’t gotten tough with you.” Callis’s dark eyes turned to stone. “I’m always tough on crooks and murderers, Hawker. They know that—and I want you to know that. But, as much as I’ve sometimes wanted to, I’ve never had the balls to take it as far as you have.”

  They had been driving for a long time now. Driving east. As they crossed a high bridge, Hawker suddenly realized they were crossing out of The Bronx.

  “Your precinct house is clear over in Manhattan?” he asked.

  Callis shook his head. “There’s only one reason you would be on Rhinestrauss Avenue, Hawk,” he said. “Some way—I don’t even want to know how—you heard about Fister Corporation’s scam to drive out those old German immigrants.”

  “Yeah? So if you already know about it, why aren’t you doing something about it?”

  “Don’t play coy, Hawker. You know what it’s like. We need hard evidence and court orders and legal wiretaps before we can make a move. That takes time and manpower and money—things we don’t have at Pelham Station.”

  “So what’s that have to do with Manhattan?”

  Callis’s lips drew tight. “Fister Corporation keeps a goon squad on retainer. Renegade Mafiosos. They’ve got their headquarters over here near the waterfront. They’re the ones who have been hitting the folks on Rhinestrauss—and probably the ones in the Lincoln who tried to hit you tonight.” Callis looked at Hawker meaningfully. “It’s where you might decide to go to work first.”

  “Does this mean I’m not under arrest?” Hawker said with a dry smile.

  Callis fumbled in his coat pocket for something. “It means I want you to tell me what happened tonight. I’ll help you get rid of any little flaws in your story. After that, I’ll take you back to the precinct for questioning. By then your story should hold water. There will be no apparent grounds for arrest, and I’ll be able to release you within an hour on your own recognizance, pending an investigation.”

  “And what will the investigation find?”

  Callis reached over and unlocked Hawker’s handcuffs. “I hope it finds that a person or persons unknown have blown Fister Corporation and their fucking goons right out of the water.”

  ten

  Grand Cayman Island

  In the two days before Jacob Montgomery Hayes was kidnapped, he compiled a folder on Fister Corporation potent enough to bring the company to its knees.

  He had gathered his information illegally, of course. Hayes had called in debts from old friends, had a half-dozen secret meetings with his bank officers, and put well-placed pressure on banks he did not control to get exactly what he wanted.

  And what he found was more disturbing than even he expected.

  Blake Fister was more than just an unscrupulous businessman. He was a would-be tyrant on an international level. Fister’s dealings in The Bronx were on a very small scale compared to his operations in France, South America, Great Britain, Canada, and West Germany.

  And always, his modus operandi was the same. He would sniff out businesses or real estate holdings in a vulnerable position, then use strong-arm tactics to buy as cheaply as possible.

  His instincts for such situations seemed to be infallible—and that was the most disturbing thing of all. Every large corporation has its own network of spies and intelligence people. A corporation has to to survive.

  But Blake Fister’s people seemed to be the very best the world’s criminal underground had to offer. And even more unsettling than that, Fister had begun moving big chunks of his money into political causes, backing government officials in every country in which he had holdings.

  Fister, it seemed, wanted more than just the power of wealth.

  He wanted the power of controlling nations.

  Jacob Montgomery Hayes was now more determined than ever to stop Blake Fister. But it wouldn’t be easy. In the last ten years, Fister had become a recluse, a recluse to a degree that made the late Howard Hughes seem like a publicity hound.

  No one knew where he lived. No one knew where or how he worked.

  But he did work. And he controlled with an iron fist.

  It was for that very reason that Hayes knew he must stop him. The world didn’t need any more Hitlers.

  It had been a busy forty-eight hours, and Hayes was tired. After his second and most productive day on the island, he had driven east out of Georgetown in the battered old Ford he kept there.

  The folder he had compiled on Fister Corporation was beside him on the seat.

  As he turned down Walker’s Road, headed for the thatch-and-wattle cottage he owned at South Sound, a strange feeling of dread came over him. It was the same premonition of death he had experienced the day his young son, Jake, had been murdered—the murder that had brought Hayes and Hawker together in an alliance.

  Hayes was too much of a scientist to be superstitious. But he had also studied Zen in Nepal, and he knew the awesome power of the mind.

  He didn’t live by intuition, but he respected it.

  Now his inner mind was trying to tell him something, and Hayes decided to listen.

  He pulled over to the side of the road and rummaged through his glove box until he found stamps. He wrote a note on the outside of the Fister Corporation folder, then sealed it in a large brown envelope. He addressed the envelope to a trusted member of his corporate headquarters in Chicago and directed her to Xerox the contents and see that Hawker and Hendricks got copies.

  That done, he found a drop box and mailed it before continuing on to his little seaside vacation house.

  His house was set back on a long coral drive behind palms and Australian pines. It had been freshly whitewashed, and a path of coquina rock led down to the sea where clear water broke over the reef.

  Hayes went inside and poured himself a glass of cold herb tea and added a dash of coconut water.

  Ceiling fans stirred the air as he carried his drink to the bathroom and stripped to take a shower. The last thing he did before he stepped beneath the spray was take off his glasses and set them beside
his tea.

  Without his glasses, he was nearly blind.

  Later, he would wonder if the two men had followed him into the house, or whether they had simply waited for him there.

  As he soaped his chest, the shower curtain was suddenly thrown back. Hayes looked up to see a blur of dark figures.

  “What in the hell do you want!” he demanded.

  “You know what we want,” said one of the figures in a heavy voice. “You’ve been collecting some information on a friend of ours. We want it. Now.”

  Having recovered from his initial shock, Hayes’s face became a placid, unreadable pool. “I won’t give it to you,” he said simply. “And anything you may do to try and get it will be fruitless.”

  “Oh, yeah?” snarled one of the dark figures. “But you won’t be offended if we try, will you?”

  Hayes’s vision was too bad for him even to see the hand coming.

  The figure hit him a stinging slap in the face and, as Hayes brought his hands up to protect himself, hit him again with a heavy fist, full in the scrotum.

  Hayes dropped to his knees in the tub.

  Barely able to breathe for the pain, he vomited into the drain.

  As he vomited, one of the men kicked him in the buttocks, and Hayes lunged face first into the mess.

  Just before he passed out, he thought, I can understand Fister’s wanting the data. But this sort of cruelty is mindless. It cannot go unpunished.…

  eleven

  New York

  Two days after James Hawker was questioned and released, he readied himself for his formal declaration of war on Fister Corporation and the mysterious Blake Fister.

  At a Boston Road used car lot, he paid cash for a black Chevrolet van. When the salesman asked him for identification so he could transfer the registration, Hawker slid a hundred-dollar bill onto the table.

  The bill disappeared into the salesman’s pocket. The salesman looked up and smiled. “Didn’t you say your name was John Smith?”

  Hawker nodded. “Right.”

  “Any particular address, Mr. Smith?”

  “I’ll let you choose one. You know the area better than I do.”

  Hawker drove the van to the warehouse where Hayes had sent his equipment. He loaded three crates into the van and, once again, paid cash. After lunch at a corner deli, he drove down Rhinestrauss Avenue, past winos sleeping in the smoggy June heat, past the strange bag ladies with their shopping carts full of junk, past an old blind beggar lady with a white cane and a cup full of pencils.

  The traffic on the sidewalks was heavier than traffic on the street.

  He parked the van outside the two-story brownstone. It rented as separate apartments, and Hawker had leased the upstairs.

  He had decided to stay in the German section because he wanted to see if there was a possibility of organizing the neighborhood into a unified body of resistance.

  It was always easier to help people when they had the will to help themselves.

  As Hawker began to unload the van, the blind lady shuffled past, tapping her cane. As she neared him, she stopped and her head swiveled back and forth as if she sensed the presence of another human being. The woman had stringy gray hair, and she wore an an old beret and heavy black glasses.

  “Guten Abend,” she called out in a shaky voice. “Guten Aben, lieber Freund!”

  Hawker smiled. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t speak German.”

  The old woman tottered around and smiled at him through bad teeth. “But I speak Amerikaner, yes? Quite good, I speak. Welch schreckliches heiss Wetter! Oh, what terrible hot weather, no?”

  Hawker fished a ten-dollar bill out of his pocket and put it into her can. “The weather is hot, yes.” When the old woman made no effort to leave, Hawker added, “Do you live around here?”

  The woman nodded emotionally. “Ja! Such a nice neighborhood. Now so bad. The men come, buy my house. My husband, Fritz, such a good man, dead. The men say I must sell our house, so I sell. In Germany, I learn not to argue with the men, ja! I sell!”

  From the look on her face, Hawker thought she was about to cry. Instead, she steadied herself and she flashed the bad grin again. “You live here, now? Ja? I come back some day. Bring you cookies I make. So nice to talk with my lieber Freunden. But I must leave soon. The men with guns say, and I do not argue with the men!”

  “Come back anytime,” Hawker said, lifting one of the crates. “I’ll watch for you. And, if things work out, maybe you won’t have to leave your home after all.”

  The woman beamed at him through her dark glasses, then tottered away down the sidewalk.

  Hawker watched her until she disappeared around the corner, then carried his load inside.

  There was something strange about the woman. Something strange and lonely and pathetic.

  New York City, Hawker decided, was the perfect place for her.

  At first dusk, Hawker began to ready himself for the fight.

  He ate a light supper of fruit and iced tea.

  He steamed himself clean in the shower, then forced himself not to flinch as he turned the cold water on full.

  He urinated and defecated—two things he didn’t want to have to think about in the middle of a firefight.

  It was the same well-loved routine he had observed before a baseball game when he played for the Detroit organization, or before a boxing match, back when he was still a teenager, fighting Golden Gloves.

  The only difference was, now the stakes were higher.

  One hell of a lot higher.

  He could feel the butterflies of tension building in his stomach: a good feeling.

  Hawker pulled on a black T-shirt and dark jeans. To his ankle, beneath the jeans, he strapped a Randall Attack-Survival combat knife. His best holster—the Jensen Quick-Draw—had been built especially for the customized Colt Commander.

  But he no longer owned the Colt.

  Lieutenant Callis had insisted that Hawker could not claim the weapon, explaining, “If you say it’s yours, I’ll have to arrest you all over again. This state’s got tough gun laws, and your permit is only good for Illinois.”

  It was true, so Hawker had not argued.

  So, in place of the Colt, Hawker selected the Browning HP 35 pistol. Along with a pretty fair range of effectiveness—seventy meters—the Browning’s most attractive feature was its thirteen-round detachable clip. Carefully Hawker filled two clips full of 9mm cartridges and slid a third into the parabellum before housing the pistol in the shoulder holster he had strapped on.

  The Browning was dependable, but Hawker had a more effective weapon in mind for the main assault.

  From the crate he lifted one of three Ingram MAC10 submachine guns. It was only about twice as long as the Browning and weighed only two kilograms more.

  But the Ingram offered one hell of a lot more fire power. The box clip held thirty-two 9mm rounds—and all could be fired, if need be, in just a deadly few seconds.

  Hawker loaded five full clips and put them with the Ingram—along with the Ingram’s threaded silencer and a silencer for the Browning—in a canvas knapsack.

  Finally Hawker chose the weapon he would use for the initial assault. He had used it before—in L.A.—and he had come to respect it for its silence and its killing power.

  It was a Cobra military crossbow. It was small and light, built of aluminum and fiberglass. By breaking it down like a pellet rifle, the weapon cocked itself automatically. It had an effective killing range of more than three-hundred yards, and the deadly, three-edged arrows traveled a hundred meters in less than a second.

  Hawker packed a dozen of the small killing bolts, then, using the same professional care, he deposited a few more surprises for the Mafioso goons in the knapsack before locking the rest of his gear away.

  That done, he pulled a jacket on over the shoulder holster and tugged a black British watch cap over his red-brown hair. After making sure the cheap lock had sealed the door as best it could, Hawker drew
out a six-foot length of piano wire. He would have liked to put it at neck level, but that was impossible because the stair railing was too low. Instead, he strung it tight between two posts at ankle level.

  He didn’t want any surprises waiting for him when he returned home.

  Hawker stepped over the wire and trotted the rest of the way down the stairs. Unexpectedly, the door of the bottom apartment opened. A wedge of light spilled out onto the tiny grass yard, and a figure peered out.

  “Hello?” said a woman’s voice. “Mr. Hawker? Is that you?”

  Hawker stopped and walked toward the figure. It was hard to make out her features because she was back-lighted. He could only see that she was tall and lithe with fine, straight blond hair cut Dutch-boy fashion. She stood half in the entranceway, holding the door.

  “That’s right, I’m Hawker,” he said, stopping on the sidewalk. “Do we know each other?”

  The woman seemed uneasy and just a little embarrassed. “No. My name is Brigitte Mildemar.” When Hawker did not immediately respond to that, she added, “I’m the owner of this house.”

  Hawker nodded and smiled. “Oh … right. Yeah, I wondered why your name sounded so familiar.”

  It was a lie. Hawker had leased the flat through a realtor. He had paid no attention to who owned it.

  She moved backward into the house a bit—but not enough so that Hawker misread it as an invitation to come in. Even so, he could see her better now. And Brigitte Mildemar was a treat to see. Her hair was white-blond, like spun glass, and it framed one of those sensuous Germanic faces with its high cheekbones, pale-blue eyes that seemed to peer out from caves, and soft chin that curved gently upward toward sunken cheeks.

  She was tall—almost as tall as Hawker, who was an inch over six feet. She wore expensive white slacks, pleated and pressed, and a white satin blouse that was primly buttoned at the neck. Even so, it revealed the sharp thrust of small, firm breasts and the narrow veeing of her waist.

  She seemed to feel Hawker’s eyes on her, and she fidgeted uncomfortably.