Trapped (16 page)

can charter a flight, but why would he? His father’s company

has a King Air 350. Take you anywhere in North America,

at altitude and in style.”

Shane smiles, winks at me, as if we’ve just won something

special. “A King, huh? Pricey.”

Bob snorts. “Not compared with a Lear, it ain’t.”

“Couple of million though, right?”

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“More.”

“And you know it’s out there in the hangar because there’s

no flight plan on file.”

Bob looks like he wants to spit. His color has improved

and he’s stopped rubbing his chest. Maybe the bad spell has

passed.

“Exactly right,” he says, jutting out his chin.

Shane nods, satisfied. “Mr. Cody, here’s the deal. Show

us the King, we’ll get out of your hair.”

“I’m not showing you anything, mister.”

“Fine. Then give me the tail number, I’ll check it out myself.”

Shane doesn’t say anything, but something tells me he

wants me to chime in, make myself heard.

“Please?” I ask him. “It could be really important.”

Five minutes later we’re approaching the hangar, one of

three in this particular row. Condos for airplanes. Sort of like

really wide storage units, with big roll-down doors. In the end

poor Mr. Cody more or less surrendered, handed Shane the

keys to the lockup. According to Cody, each unit can hold

two aircraft, with openings on either side of the corrugated

steel buildings, but Edwin Manning’s corporate airplane has

a hangar all to itself.

“You think they took off in daddy’s plane, got in trouble

somewhere else?” I ask.

“Working theory,” Shane says, fitting the key in the ap-

propriately numbered door. “Subject to change.”

Inside the hangar our footsteps echo against the metal

sides of the building. It’s so dim and darkly shadowed that I

can’t see much of anything until Shane finds a switch and

trips the overhead lights.

“Surprise, surprise,” he says.

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The hangar is empty.

“What do we do now?” I ask.

Behind us the door swings open, shifting the light. Before

I can turn, a ragged, high-pitched voice says,

“Keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

Standing behind us is a hefty, big-bellied man in a baggy

black tracksuit. He has a shaved head, a boxer’s flattened

nose, puffy eyelids and scar-thickened lips. In his hand is a

shiny black gun.

26. The Man From Wonderbra

My first mugging was in Manhattan. On Fifth Avenue, to

be exact. About four months after Kelly was born, my mother

decided I needed a day off. A chance, she said, to be a grown-

up for a little while, on my own. Bless her, she gave me a

hundred dollars and told me to take the train into the city, have

lunch at the Museum of Modern Art—they had a great little

Italian café she loved—and buy myself something pretty.

“Window-shop on Fifth Avenue,” she said. “I mean really

look. There might be something there for you.”

A hundred dollars was a lot for my mother, but I thought

it would go further at, say, Macy’s, than some upscale

boutique, and since part of me was still a bratty seventeen-

year-old, I said so.

“I don’t mean to buy,” she told me, squeezing my hands.

“To learn from. Look and learn.”

Look and learn.

Truer words and all that. The only class I’d ever really

excelled in was home ec, and that was because of sewing.

Having watched my mother stitch my little dresses together,

and most of her own clothing, as well, I knew how the

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machine worked, wasn’t afraid of the flashing needle, and

that put me ahead of the other girls. Plus I was interested in

how clothes were designed and cut out and assembled.

So there I was, looking and learning, and loving every minute

of it. I was a grown-up in the big city, studying retail fashion.

Not just style and quality of the clothing, but how it was pre-

sented. The design and execution of the window display, the

whole look of the thing. I wasn’t taking notes, but my eyes were

soaking it all in and my brain was thinking, why does Mom want

me to do this, what does she have in mind? It was intriguing,

exciting. It might, just might, be a clue about what I should do,

how I might live. And that, of course, is when I got mugged.

I had my best leather bag securely slung over my shoulder

and around my neck, right hand on the strap. I didn’t see the

gang of boys coming, but they saw me, and the biggest of

them snaked his arm through the strap—he never stopped

moving—and the next thing I was being carried down Fifth

Avenue by five or six boys. White boys with low-rider atti-

tudes, laughing and cackling and being so outrageously bois-

terous that my muffled shouts went nowhere. It must have

looked like I was part of the gang, if you didn’t happen to

notice that my feet weren’t connected to the sidewalk.

They carried me for most of one block, worked the strap

free of my neck, yanked my hair so hard it felt like they’d

torn my scalp, and then dumped me on the sidewalk, scraped

and bleeding from both knees. Bag gone, money gone, day

ruined. All in broad daylight, with hundreds of pedestrians

within arm’s reach, every last one of them looking away, stu-

diously avoiding the noxious teen spirit.

Without the fare to get home, and barely enough for a

phone call, Mom had to pack up Kelly, come into the city and

rescue me. Found me angry and red eyed in Penn Station,

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cursing Manhattan. Could happen anywhere, she said, com-

forting me. Don’t blame it on the city and don’t let it get you

down. That was her other mantra.
Don’t let it get you down,

baby doll.
A constant refrain to herself as well as me, and it

got us through a lot. My father leaving, me dropping out of

school to have a baby, me getting my GED, me eventually

graduating from the Long Island Fashion Institute, me getting

my first real job.

A whole lot of me, and not much Mom. That was her gift,

of course, the road she willingly took from the moment I

finally confessed to the pregnancy I’d been hiding and deny-

ing for months.

Secrets.

Anyhow, where was I? Oh, right. The man with the shiny

black gun. My second mugging. Guy with a gun, he must

want my handbag, right?

“You and your boyfriend, stop right there,” he demands,

in a voice that seems a little too high and scratchy for his bulk.

“Keep your hands where I can see ’em.”

His oddly protuberant eyes are darting between me and

Shane, like he’s playing eenie-meenie in his head. Is it a

thyroid condition does that to the eyeballs? Or high blood

pressure? Anyhow, he has eyes like boiled eggs and his close-

shaved skull looks like a chunk of hard, lumpy wax glisten-

ing under the overhead lights. A drop of sweat congeals at

the tip of his flattened nose. An ugly-looking customer for

sure, but what bothers me even more than the gun—is it real

or a toy, how would I know the difference?—what really

bothers me is this: the man is very, very nervous.

“Listen real careful,” says the egg man, pausing to wipe the

sweat from his nose with his free hand. “Stay away from

Edwin Manning. Stay away from his home, his family, his

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business, his airplanes, everything to do with him. Stay away,

you’ll be okay. Don’t stay away, bad things’ll happen.

Capiche?”

“Understood,” says Shane, sounding utterly reasonable.

“You happen to know where the King Air was headed?”

The man’s forehead furrows. Beads of sweat seep from his

forehead, making his egg-shaped eyes blink even more

rapidly. “The
what?
I told you—shut up!”

“The Beechcraft that’s supposed to be in this hangar.

Where’d it go? We’re assuming Seth was at the controls. He

never bothered to file a fight plan, why was that?”

The man with the gun looks confused, unsure of how to

respond, and he looks at me with a beleaguered expression, as

if he wants me to intervene, stop all these complicated questions.

In that moment, as his buggy eyes shift, Shane glides in

front of me, blocking my view.

Next thing I know, the egg man is lying sideways on the

concrete, groaning and holding his shoulder, and Shane has

the gun. Which on second glance—or tenth—isn’t all that

shiny. Just black and deadly.

With an air of icy calm Shane says, “Lock the door, please,

Mrs. Garner. There should be a thumb latch on the knob.”

I hurry to the door. Set the lock before it hits me—

shouldn’t we be running away? But it soon becomes appar-

ent that Randall Shane has other plans.

“Wallet?” he says to the burly, big-gutted man on the floor.

A nasty scratch on the side of the man’s shaved head

oozes a little blood, just above the ear. “Fuck you, Jack!” he

says in his high, scratchy voice. “Why’d ya do that, huh?”

Shane says, “Very prudent, leaving the safety on. Which

means whoever sent you issued specific instructions. In the

future, you want to menace someone with a Sig Sauer, and

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do it safely, don’t try ‘cocked and locked.’ Empty the cham-

ber. The safety slide is a tip-off.”

“Yeah, thanks.” The man grimaces, baring his teeth. “You

broke something, you fuck.”

“Your right collarbone,” Shane informs him. “It’ll heal

eventually. Now kindly produce identification or I’ll break

your left collarbone. That means an upper-chest cast. Very

awkward and you’ll be laid up for six weeks.”

The man angrily slips a fist into his baggy tracksuit, flings

a wallet at Shane, who lets it drop to the concrete in front of him.

“Please pick that up,” he asks me, very polite, never wavering

with the gun. “Let’s see if this nice gentleman has a name.”

The billfold is a quality piece, Italian made. Dyed ostrich

skin, hand stitched. Inside, a New Jersey driver’s license

identifies our would-be assailant as Salvatore J. Popkin,

residing on McKinley Avenue in Atlantic City.

“Says he’s six foot, two hundred pounds,” I note.

Shane chuckles. “More like five-nine, two-fifty,” he says.

“Didn’t your mother teach you to always tell the truth, Sal?”

I keep rummaging through the billfold, hold out another

identification card for inspection.

“Interesting,” Shane says. “Sal is a security crew super-

visor at Wunderbar Casino. That’s the one they call Wonder-

bra, right Sal? On account of the chip girls?”

“I ain’t talkin’ to you,” Sal responds sullenly.

“Sure you are,” Shane cajoles. “You were sent here to talk

to us, right? Try to scare us? Why else have the gun on safety?

You want us to leave Mr. Manning and his various toys alone.

Anything else?”

Sal thinks about it. While he’s mulling it over his fingers

probe the scratch above his ear and he inspects the seeping

blood. His expression becomes even more malevolent. If his

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127

swollen, oddly protuberant eyes were laser beams we’d both

be burned to a crisp. But they’re not, and he’s on the floor

with a broken collarbone, and something tells me Randall

Shane doesn’t need a weapon to reduce Salvatore Popkin to

a whimpering puddle, and Sal knows it and hates him for it.

“Just keep the fuck away,” he says grudgingly. “That’s it.”

“Or else? Threats of physical harm and so on?”

“Yeah, big-time.”

Shane considers this. “So Edwin Manning tells you keep

an eye on his empty hangar? Or is it more like, if certain

people come sniffing around, looking for Seth, run them off?”

Sal looks away, purses his sweaty lips. Clearly wishing

himself elsewhere, on a planet that didn’t include big rangy guys

who can take away his gun, break his bones. “Got it all figured

out, huh? If you’re so smart, why’d the FBI get rid of you?”

This elicits a dangerous-looking smile from Shane. “I left

in good standing,” he says softly. “Not that it’s any of your

concern. But thank you for confirming that your boss read

my business card.”

“Concrete is killing me,” the fat man protests. “I’m

gonna get up.”

“Not quite yet,” Shane tells him, emphasizing with the gun.

“Couple of ways to play this. I can notify the authorities—and

that will include the Feds—and we can press charges. Assault

with a firearm, threat of deadly force. Serious felony charge,

especially if you don’t happened to be licensed to carry this par-

ticular weapon. Or, and I’m hoping Mrs. Garner will indulge

me in this, we can go a different route. You with me so far?”

Another grudging nod from the floor.

“How about this?” Shane suggests. “You report back to

Mr. Manning, tell him the threat worked. You waved a gun

around and talked tough and we’re frightened out of our

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minds. We begged for mercy. We promised to keep out of