Hard Case Crime: The Max (14 page)

Yanni had never once let him out of his sight and two days after their first meeting had bought tickets to America, saying, “We get this done now.”

Sebastian was seriously afraid of the maniac. If he had demurred, he was sure the crazy bugger would have slit his throat. He tried to look on the bright side, maybe they would score some serious dosh off Angela. Assuming they could ever find her.

What did irritate Sebastian a tad — well, ok, a lot — was that Sebastian was paying the freight. Yanni had disappeared with the biggest of the paintings; it had turned out to be the real deal, a bloody
Constable,
and he’d promptly fenced it. He’d flung ten large at Sebastian and said, “Your share.”

Was he going to argue that the scoundrel had probably
gotten a damn fortune for it, hell of a lot more than twenty K? He took the cash, and talk about damn cheek, Yanni made Sebastian pay for the tickets, in business class no less. Put a hell of a dent in the ten.

Yanni carried on scandalously on the plane, drinking champagne like it was water, leering at the hostesses and, when the in-flight movie came on, something starring Nicole Kidman, he kept nudging Sebastian and making lewd comments. Sebastian tried to act like he wasn’t with Yanni, knocking back gin and tonics like a good un and trying to make sympathetic eyes at the stewardesses, as if to say
I’ve nothing to do with this cretin.

In New York the heat and humidity was fierce and as Sebastian wiped his brow, Yanni scoffed, “This is
tipota
, in Santorini we see this as mild spring day.”

Sebastian, his lined suit creased beyond repair, felt a hatred for this bounder like he’d never felt in his whole shallow life and resolved, soon as this business was concluded, he was going to kill the fucker slowly and whisper as he died, “That’s not heat, brother, it’s just a mild slashing of your olive stinking throat.”

Ah, the things to look forward to.

Then they were in a cab and heading for Queens. Who’d said anything about staying in Queens? Didn’t the fellow have the decency to consult him about their travel arrangements? He was planning on getting a couple of rooms at the Mansfield, a small hotel he’d read about in a cheap mystery novel once; it sounded classy and was right across the road from The Algonquin.
Couldn’t ask for a better pedigree than that. But Yanni, lighting up a Karelia in the cab, didn’t care about pedigree. So off to Queens they went.

Blowing smoke in Sebastian’s face, Yanni said, “We stay with my family in Astoria, they help us track the she-devil. She has Greek blood, they will track her down.”

Sebastian finally found his voice, said, “Actually, old chap, I’d rather stay in midtown and we can meet up later, let you reunite with your family in peace.”

Yanni, his eyes as black as hell, squeezed Sebastian’s thigh, hard — the animal had a grip like a vise — and said, “You don’t make decisions. I tell you how it is, you say
epaharisto poli
. You get to leave when this is done, you understand,
mallakas?
”

He did.

The family were a nightmare and, lordy, how many of them were they, enough to storm Manhattan by themselves... and noisy, radios blaring, everybody roaring in Greek, tons of kissing and hugging, only not for Sebastian, whom they looked at with derision. No one said a word to him. It was like
My Big Fat Greek Wedding
without the one-liners.

At dinner, more talk in Greek. It sounded like six arguments were going on at once. Sebastian couldn’t understand a thing, just wandered around, trying not to get in the way.

One of the uncles, he noticed, had his wallet sticking out of his back pocket, just begging to be snatched. Sebastian often wondered why people were
careless with their valuables. Were they trying to give their money away? Out of sheer boredom, Sebastian snatched it, not expecting to find much. The guy’s hair was a mess and he was wearing a horrendous shirt open to his belly button, proudly displaying a chunky wooden necklace — not exactly the look of a man of wealth.

When the fellow discovered his wallet was missing there was the usual fuss with everyone talking at once, helping him look around for it. During the commotion, Sebastian managed to slip out of the apartment without Yanni seeing. He sprinted around the corner and then two more blocks, hopped a turnstile. A subway was at the station, ready to depart, and Sebastian yelled, “Hold the doors!”

A homeless guy put his hand in front of one of the doors, delaying the close, and Sebastian managed to slip inside in the nick of time.

“Thank you, squire,” he said. If he’d had some American coins he would’ve tipped the kind fellow, but he didn’t. He settled for shaking the man’s hand, a gesture neither of them enjoyed very much.

He rode the subway into Manhattan, proud of his ingenuity. He was a cunning ol’ chappie, wasn’t he?

It had been ages since he’d been to the city and he was planning to check into his usual room at the Mansfield — those kind fellows always gave him the top floor suite — and then take in some of the sights. He could do with some good food as well. There was a Brazilian restaurant in midtown he quite liked where
the maitre d’ was a good sport and always gave him the best table in the place and, oh yes, free drinks. He didn’t know what they put in those bloody drinks but the last time he’d gone there he’d left so drunk he’d fallen over a pile of garbage on the curb and not gotten up for the better part of an hour.

At the Fifty-ninth Street stop, Sebastian disembarked and was about to climb the stairs when he heard, “Where you think you going, Brit boy?”

He thought he must be hallucinating but he turned around and sure enough Yanni was there. The bloody hell?

Covering his anguish with a sarcastic grin, Sebastian said, “I was just going for a bit of a stroll, care to join me?”

Back in captivity, or Queens, Sebastian spent days watching reruns of
The Odd Couple
and drinking that thick treacle they called coffee. The only thing that made it at all palatable was if you put a nip of Metaxa in it. And Heavens to Betsy, the Greeks might be a pain in the arse, no slur on their homoerotic heritage, but they sure did keep an awful lot of booze in the house.

Another saving grace: One of the women of the house, Irini, had that dark sultry look, the doe-brown eyes and one of those lush Greek figures that so quickly ran to fat but until then was simmering hot. Her English was almost American, with only a slight Greek inflection. She was forever cleaning and each time he got a buzz building, giggling away at Oscar and Felix, there she’d be, telling — not asking, mind,
telling — him to move his big English legs out of the way. The drinks, the reruns, and Irina helped him keep his mind off his situation.

Which was looking worse each day. The men were pulling out all the stops to find Angela, but so far had found nothing, zilch,
tipota
. Like she’d vanished off the island of Manhattan, assuming she’d actually made it there in the first place. And Yanni’s brood were seriously pissed. The Greek network was good and they prided themselves on tracking any Greek, anywhere, but it wasn’t happening. And Sebastian was worried all that anger would wind up being let out in his direction someday soon.

Irini, hands on her hips, her wedding band shining, asked Sebastian, “Why you no help the men, you sit here all day, doing nothing?”

But he spotted a slight sheen of moisture above her lip and realized, this filly wanted rogering, a tad of the old Billy Bunter. And by golly, he was the chap to do it.

He said, “I could find her in five minutes.”

Her eyes widened, and she asked, looking a bit like a mare in heat, “How?’

He gestured around the cramped living room, said, “They keep me a virtual prisoner, if I had access to a laptop, I’d have her tracked in no time.”

She said, “I have a laptop. For my studies.”

He wondered if there was a course in sweeping.

She lowered her eyes demurely, said, “It is in my bedroom.”

He rose languidly. Sebastian tried never to do anything in a hurry unless it was... flee.

He said, “Show me what you’ve got.”

Her room was filled with talismans — the evil eye, a mega statue of Makarios — and lo and fucking behold, in the middle of all this devotion, a poster of Guns N’ Roses.

That was all she wrote. He rode her on the flokati rug and get this, the bitch bit him, twice, till he asked in his best Brit tone, “Try not to bite the merchandise.”

Afterwards, still sweaty and naked, he opened the laptop and got Google to work its dark magic. His one idea was to find an address for Angela’s ex, that Max Fisher bloke she’d complained about so much. Instead, he read about Fisher’s bloody arrest. He was simply appalled to discover that Fisher had been a drug dealer. What sort of man had Angela been associating herself with? As if there had been any doubt, he was certain now he’d been the classiest lay she’d ever had.

But arrested, this wasn’t good at all. He’d been hoping Fisher could help them find Angela. How could he help them from a jail cell in Attica?

But then he thought, who knows. That Hannibal Lecter chap had been able to help Jodie Foster from his jail cell in that movie, the
Lambs
one. Maybe this Fisher could be of at least
some
use.

When you’ve only got one straw, you grasp at it.

One article from the
New York Post
gave the address where Fisher was serving his sentence; that not only
meant Sebastian knew where to find him, it also meant Angela knew. He’d have laid stiff odds that she had paid him at least one visit there, and who knows, maybe she’d come more than once. Maybe he’d know where she was and could steer them to her.

Sebastian was downright proud of his ingenuity. A bloody Sherlock Holmes, he was. It would have taken the Greeks, what, five years to come up with this angle?

Irini gave him a cold Amstel and, by golly, it was good. She said, “You must be quick.”

He winked at her, said, “You sang a different tune on the rug.”

She said, “If Marko comes home, he will cut your balls off.”

He got right on it.

“The man who shoots people in the legs for effect, thinks that I might have been unnecessarily violent?”

A
LLAN
G
UTHRIE
,
Two-Way Split

First thing Sino was gonna do when he got out — come at that
bandajo
Max Fisher hard. His two weeks in the hole, he been thinking about that shit all the time, thinking of different ways to make the man feel pain.

Fuckin’ Fisher. Sino shoulda taken his
gorda
ass out himself, made a mistake out saucering that shit to that
puta
Carlito. You can’t trust a Mexican to do nothing ’cept make burritos and even then, check out all the PR’s they hire at Taco Bell.

Fourteen
dias
in the hole and it didn’t break Sino at all. Made him stronger, more
duro
. He spent the time workin’ out down there, doin’ a thousand push-ups a day, and thinkin’ maybe he do Fisher with his hands. Take his time with it, maybe start in on his face, to hear some bones breakin’, that was always a lot of fun. Fisher, the
bandajo
, would be screamin’ and beggin’, and that’d only get Sino goin’ more. Maybe he’d break his arms, then his legs, all the bones in his body one by one, till he was one big pile of
maricon
bones. But he’d
still be alive ’cause, yeah, that’s what Sino wanted, to make the man stay alive, to keep feeling pain.

Or, maybe he should burn Fisher’s ass? Yeah, seeing a man die in
fuera
was like a fuckin’ fiesta.

Wait, hold up, Sino had a better way to do it. He’d get a shank and cut him up real good. Name’s Fisher, right? So Sino gonna cut him up like a fish. Do it nice and slow too. Little cuts first, make the man see some blood, then get in deeper, make him see some
real
blood. He’d cut his whole body up but save the best part for last. Man say he cut a man’s dick off, like to talk about it all the time? Maybe Sino gonna cut off Fisher’s dick, feed it to him,
then
kill him.

Make that
bandajo
wish he never took that pie from Sino.

Angela had the cash, now all she had to do was trade it for the weapons and the car Max wanted. Way back, her boyfriend Dillon, that wannabe boyo — and what a piece of work he’d been — had introduced her to Sean, a genuine boyo, as lethal as they came. She’d seen him roll a dead cop in a blanket and dump him like an old carpet. Sean was from that fierce and ferocious school of old paramilitaries, the sort that’d never surrender, they’d sooner go down in a blaze of armalites and were always tooled to the max.

Sean, whose only claim to an income came from irregular shifts as a taxi driver, had a stammer and an atrocious record with women. He’d get seriously drunk, approach the most attractive woman in a room, and
with his stammer go, “I’m Se... a... n... I’ve... n-n-n-n-n-o... job...... will you let me r-r-r-r-r-ride you?”

Subtle, right? It was certainly clear and direct communication, but he was batting zero.

Angela knew he had the hots for her, due to the drool that leaked from his lips any time he looked at her. Time to make it sing.

He lived in an abandoned warehouse on the Lower East Side. He didn’t bother too much with security. His rep was well known — you rip off the boyos, dig a deep hole.

Angela knew how to visit a murderous mick: Bring a seven course feast — six bottles of the black and a litre of Jameson.

She climbed the shabby, worn stairs to his apartment on the second floor, seeing rats scurrying in the stairwell corners. They didn’t trouble her. After Greece, four-legged rodents were the least of her fears.

She knocked on his door, which had a massive Green Harp on it. He pulled it open and she thought,
Jesus, he’s gone downhill
.

Never an oil painting, he was dressed in a Galway Hurling T-shirt and baggy combats. He was barefoot and his face, under the red beard... it looked like someone had taken a blowtorch to it. Probably someone had — though Sean was still here, so whoever did it was surely now feeding whatever still swam in the East River. She noticed the SIG in his left hand, held casually.