Gamma Blade (7 page)

“Done.” Elon paused. He said, matter-of-factly: “I screwed up a little, boss.”

Brull didn’t think he had. Elon had been holding back, away from the pier, and had spotted the stranger watching the
Merry May
boat. Watching it not like a boat-lover admiring a fine specimen, but like a guy poking his nose in where it didn’t belong.

So Elon had acted quickly and decisively. He’d slugged the guy, and would have taken him captive, and brought him to Brull for questioning. It was Elon’s bad luck that the big cop, the NYPD officer, happened to be walking by at that very moment. Elon had done the right thing by running. And he’d been smart enough to lure the cop down the alley where he knew Brull himself was hanging back.

No, Elon hadn’t screwed up at all. But Brull believed one of the techniques of an effective leader was never to show your subordinates that they were being too hard on themselves, but rather always to make them worry that they’d disappointed you.

So Brull said: “Whatever. It’s happened. Make it right.”

“Boss.”

Brull hung up.

He had another call to make.

But first, he allowed himself a few moments’ reflection.

*

Should he have killed the cop?

Brull had been on the point of doing so. He wondered if the cop, Venn, understood how close he’d come to death. Brull’s finger had begun squeezing back on the trigger of the Glock, and a couple of millimeters more would have sent the bullet smashing through the guy’s head.

In the final nano-second before he completed the action, Brull had become aware of two things.

He hated the big man on his knees before him. Hated him with a fury as incandescent as a phosphorus bomb.

And he had a hard-on.

It was the tightness in his pants more than anything else that stopped Brull’s finger from pulling the trigger back those last two millimeters.

His tumescence meant that his body, as opposed to his rational brain, was calling the shots.

And that, in business, was never a good idea.

The orgasmic thrill he’d get from blowing the New York cop’s brains across the floor of the alleyway would be intense. Ecstatic.

But it would be short-lived, like a drug high.

And the hangover would outweigh the trip.

The hangover would consist of the entire Miami PD up Brull’s ass, like a troop of weekend hunters from Hicksville hell-bent on bagging themselves the only bear in the woods. The cops wouldn’t stop. They’d bend, and break, the rules. They’d come down hard on every stool pigeon, every low-level contact that Brull had in Florida. And sooner or later, one of those deadbeats would crack. They’d give up a name, which would lead to another name, until Brull found himself cornered.

Brull didn’t like cops. He thought most of them were as dumb as a sack of mice, and he had no personal qualms about killing any of them. One night he’d had a dream that he’d weaponized  a mutant strain of the Ebola virus, which targeted only law-enforcement officers. He walked the streets of Miami in his dream, watching uniformed cops dissolving into leaking bags of blood. He’d woken up laughing.

But there was one thing he respected about cops. One thing only.

They were loyal. They looked out for their own.

And an injury to one really was an injury to all. Even the laziest, most lard-assed of pigs would get up off his sweaty butt to join the hunt for a cop-killer.

So Brull’s finger had frozen on the Glock’s trigger, and slowly he’d let it slip back to its resting position.

He’d hit the New York cop hard, across the nape of the neck, making sure the sight of the gun gouged his shorn scalp. Brull was practiced at knocking men unconscious with a single blow, and this guy was a sitting duck. He’d watched the burly torso slump forward across the knees, and for good measure he’d kicked the guy square in the ass afterward, though he didn’t think the cop felt it because he was out cold already.

He hoped the son of a bitch woke up with the headache from hell. And with a sudden desire to terminate his weekend vacation down here in the south and board the next flight back to his candy-ass New York City, with its stupid accents and shitty winters.

But as Brull took the Dodge deeper into Miami, leaving the flashy waterfront high-rises behind for the darker, meaner streets, he understood that there was a downside to his decision to spare the cop’s life.

As he’d gazed down at Venn’s face, the closed eyes, he’d seen that this wasn’t just some pumped-up muscleman who was all image and no substance.

Even unconscious, the cop looked
mean
.

He was a detective lieutenant, not some asshole patrolman. He’d just been humiliated, and had his lights punched out.

He was probably a racist, too, and he would have detected from Brull’s voice that Brull was Cuban.

All of which added up to this: there was a hard-nosed bastard alive in Miami, who was a senior law enforcement officer and likely a bigot, and who’d heard Brull’s voice before Brull had knocked him senseless.

If Brull were in the cop’s position, he’d walk through hell itself to settle the score.

*

Brull pushed all thought of Joseph Venn from his mind and speed-dialed one of the first six numbers on his phone’s list.

Unlike Elon a few minutes earlier, Popok answered after a full five rings.

“Yes?”

The man drew the single syllable out so that it sounded like three. Brull had no idea where the guy had learned his English, but he spoke it like he was trying to sound like a British stage actor performing Shakespeare. Unfortunately his dense, guttural accent let him down, so he ended up sounding like he’d either had a stroke or was slightly retarded.

Brull had never met Abdu Popok. He’d spoken with him many times over the last year, via satellite- and encrypted cell-phone, but although he’d searched for the man online, he’d never found his picture. He had a fair idea, though, what the Turkmen looked like. Brull imagined a fleshy, jowly guy in a cheap suit, the armpits stained with sweat. Probably small eyeglasses perched on a piggy nose, and sparse hair plastered sideways across his scalp with Brylcreem, or whatever brand of hair product they used in Turkmenistan.

Brull had Googled Turkmenistan, too. It looked like an utter shithole, squashed into the middle of Asia next to the Caspian Sea, with a human rights record that put it in Amnesty International’s basement. Kind of like Brull’s own Cuba in Castro’s heyday, but without the sunshine and the terrific music.

But what it did have, was natural gas reserves. A ton of them. And that meant that there were a whole lot of rich people in Turkmenistan. Rich people who were looking to branch out internationally, and who were putting out feelers into locations such as Beijing and Bangkok and  London and Toronto and Miami, where businessmen like Ernesto Justice Brull were offering a niche product.

So Brull didn’t much care how repulsive Popok, or his home nation, were.

He saw a market, and he responded to it.

He said: “It didn’t work out tonight. There was a complication. I’m working on it.”

Down the crackle of the line, Brull thought he heard heavy, labored breathing. Maybe Popok had asthma or something. Maybe he was smoking a cigarette.

Or maybe he was getting a blowjob.

Brull recoiled at the thought.

Popok said, “Complication?”

“Yes. Don’t worry about it. It’s a detail. Nothing more.”

Another pause.

“This is unacceptable,” said Popok.

“It is what it is,” Brull said, easily.

“I require confirmation that product has been dispatched.” The Turkmen sounded to Brull like a not particularly intelligent customer calling to complain that his bulk order of Doritos was late arriving.

Brull said: “You’ll get that confirmation. Right now, I’ve got nothing more to offer you but my word.”

He expected the man to start blustering, to threaten him. But instead he listened to silence for a few seconds. Then Popok said, “When can I expect news?”

“Most likely tomorrow night.”

Popok grunted. He sounded disapproving, but pacified.

“What went wrong?” he said in his thick accent.

“Nothing, really,” Brull answered smoothly. “My men were just taking extra care. They evaluated the situation, believed there to be a risk of the police taking an interest, and decided to abort the meeting. They chose wisely, in my view. Better to be safe than sorry.”

“The police...?” murmured the Turkmen at the other end.

“Like I said. Don’t worry. Of course there are cops everywhere. This is Miami. There happened to be a few of them in the vicinity tonight, just out on patrol, and my guys decided it wasn’t worth the risk.” Brull was getting impatient at covering old ground all over again. “Listen, I’ll call you tomorrow, around the same time.”

He hung up and dropped the phone on the seat next to him.

In truth, he had no idea if the meet could take place tomorrow night. He didn’t know what the cops knew, or whether they were even now boarding the boat and making enquiries. He was pretty sure this New York cop, this Venn guy, wasn’t anything more than a passerby who, in an unfortunate turn of coincidental events, happened to have seen Elon knocking the mystery man unconscious. But Venn had called the local cops, and the unconscious stranger was now under their protection, and Brull didn’t know who in the hell the man was.

So things had gotten complicated.

There were three priorities, then.

Find out more about Venn and what he was doing in Miami.

Find the stranger whose assistance Venn had gone to.

And reschedule the
Merry May
business.

Brull saw a wide boulevard ahead and floored the accelerator, exulting in the surge of the Challenger’s engine as it roared beneath him.

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter 10

The cop Venn was riding with was good, keeping pace with the ambulance as it screamed through the congested Friday evening streets and never allowing more than a couple of vehicles to get between the patrol car and the ambulance’s taillights. The cop didn’t say anything as he drove, and that suited Venn fine, because he was still feeling a little groggy and small talk wasn’t what he needed.

It had taken him a few seconds to orient himself in the alleyway before the realization hit him: he hadn’t been shot. His head hurt like a son of a bitch, and his vision was shifting from double to single and back again at an alarming rate, but there’d been no bullet.

The guy had hit him, probably with the butt of the gun, and then taken off. It meant he’d been smart enough to understand the implications of becoming a cop killer, and had decided not to go there.

Which suggested two things.

The man wasn’t dumb.

And he hadn’t killed a cop before.

But he’d sounded, and acted, like a professional. Already a vague, insubstantial picture of the man was beginning to form in Venn’s methodical, police detective’s mind.

He had the guy’s voice imprinted in his auditory cortex, and he played back snatches of it as he rode in the patrol car, listening for nuances. The guy hadn’t exactly sounded like a professor of astrophysics, but he sounded educated to several rungs higher than your average street thug.

The hospital appeared suddenly in front of them, a tall blocky structure festooned with blazing lights and a platoon of ambulances swarming in and out of the entrance gate. It looked busy as a railroad station at rush hour, and Venn guessed this was one of the major destinations for people who’d gotten sick or been injured in Miami on a Friday night.

The ambulance they were following came to a controlled but abrupt halt in a bay outside the ER. The patrol car pulled in behind it, allowing space for the rear doors to be opened. As Venn swung his lanky frame from the back seat - he felt a tug of nausea, and realized the blow to the back of his head was still having an effect - he saw the ambulance doors open and the female paramedic jump down. She slid the gurney down after her and Beth came out last.

Venn winced as he saw her land on the asphalt. She hadn’t done anything but drop down as anybody would, but he didn’t think a jolt of any kind would be good for the baby.

Then he shook his head at himself.
Stop being so anxious.

The paramedics and Beth rolled the gurney into the ER, Venn and the two cops from the patrol car following at a less hurried pace. Inside, the ER reminded Venn of the ones back in New York and Chicago. The layout was different, but the rest was the same: the hubbub of human noise, the frenetic rushing about, the smell of booze and spilled blood and antiseptic.

A senior-looking nurse stepped in front of them and asked them if she could help. She let them through after one of the uniformed cops had given a brief explanation, but by that time they’d lost Beth and the others.

They found them in an examination room, where a team of ER staff were already getting busy around the unconscious man, attaching him to assorted leads, drawing tubes of blood from his arm, shining pencil flashlights in his eyes. A doctor saw Venn and the other two cops hovering near the sliding door of the room and made a shooing gesture with his fingers.

They withdrew, and glanced at each other. Venn had been through this kind of thing before, and he supposed the two patrolmen had, too. The guy in the room was now out of their hands, and in a bunch of other people’s. It felt like they’d been robbed, and it was frustrating.

The door slid open a moment later and Beth emerged.

“They’re ordering a CT scan, but there doesn’t seem to be any neurological damage so far,” she said.

Venn: “When’s he gonna wake up?”

She raised her eyebrows. “No way of telling with these things.” She stepped closer. “Now, let’s get you looked at.”

Venn took a pace back, held up his hands. “Whoah. No need for that.”

Beth looked gently exasperated. “You just got knocked unconscious yourself,” she chided. “You’re not leaving here until you get checked out.”

Venn knew better than to argue.