Old Flame (21 page)

“And you have that.”

“Yeah. And it all starts with the real estate market.”

“Hell of a circumstance.”

“Right now, you bet your ass it is. Ever since the subprime mortgage bubble blew up, real estate prices dropped off the cliff. Properties like Dave’s that were on the market at gonzo inflated values suddenly slid twenty, thirty percent or more and went begging even at the discount. So, what’s an owner to do?”

“Like they used to say when there was a garment industry in this city, ‘If you can’t make a flood, make a fire,’ ” I said.

“Exactly. And Pytho has had a bunch of them lately. Sloppy, amateurish jobs. Fucker hires a couple of lame-ass torches, and they go at it with a couple of containers of gasoline.”

“Tough to find good help these days.”

“Tell me about it,” Sal agreed.

“So, if there wasn’t an accelerant at Dave’s warehouse, what was it?”

“Two points of origin.” Sal’s eyes twinkled, and his mustache gave a self-congratulatory twitch. “That was the first clue. It took a lot of looking, but I could tell from the charring. The doer bored small holes in the lath and plaster walls, stuffed them with newspapers, and lit it up. Basically, you had a classic fire tetrahedron: fuel, oxygen, heat, and what eventually became—as we say in the arson game—an uninhibited chemical reaction.”

“I don’t get it. Lath is metal, and plaster doesn’t burn.”

“That’s now. Unfortunately for the stiffs, the warehouse was built around 1900. Back then the lath was wood, and so are the floors.”

“Not a happy circumstance.”

“You might say. Everything was going on real slow inside the walls. But when the Red Devil hit the flooring and made it to the crates full of all that Chinese import shit, it just had more to eat. It took a couple of hundred firefighters with their snot turned to icicles to put it out. It was one hairy job.”

“What about the sprinklers?”

“Fucked. We figure before the party got started the partygoers tried to rip out some piping, sell it, and maybe do some Christmas shopping. With brass going for close to two bucks a pound, they could score enough shit to last a few days. But all the poor bastards managed to do was break the pipe that fed the sprinkler.”

“Bad things tend to happen to the least of us. The way of the world. But how does this lead back to Dave?”

“In and of itself, it doesn’t,” Sal said.

I turned to my brother. “I don’t see the problem, Dave. Pytho refuses to pay, tough shit. A cost of doing business. All you’re out is some money.”

“There’s more,” Dave said.

“Why is it there’s always more?”

Sal closed his briefcase and locked it. “We found six bodies in the basement. In coffins. Looked like a funeral parlor showroom, all neat and lined up a few feet from each other.”

“This is a new one,” I said.

“For me too. I call them coffins, but they were really sealed metal boxes with air holes punched in the side. Twelve of them. But only six contained bodies. The others were empty. And here’s the thing. When we pried them open, there was a full-length mirror under each lid. And as an added attraction, we found one of those key-ring flashlights in each of the boxes. All the comforts of home.”

“Sweet Jesus! They watched themselves die?”

“Fucked up, huh? But just when you think it can’t get better, it does.”

“I can hardly wait.”

“According to the medical examiner, at least four of the guys were alive when the fire took them. Talked to each other too. And maybe to the guy who put them there.”

“What do you mean, ‘talked to each other’?”

“Each box had one of those walkie-talkies. Talk about your basic horror show.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“Neither do I,” Dave said. “I put the warehouse on the market six months ago, locked it up, and walked away. No one had access.”

“What about the counterfeit stuff ?”

“Ever since the latest Fed crackdown, I got out of the business. Left it to the Chinatown gangs. Too much risk, not enough reward. Whatever Nick couldn’t move on the street, I left sitting there, growing mold.”

“And you have no idea where the bodies came from?”

“Not a clue.”

“Let’s put it this way,” Sal said. “They were so fucked up, we’re down to checking dental records and waiting on a toxicology report.”

“Look, Jake,” Dave said, using the nickname he tagged me with when we were kids. “We know how this is going to go down. The DA is all about expedience. He looks at my line of work, sees the stiffs, puts two and two together, and comes up with the brilliant deduction that I iced those guys. I take the fall, another case cleared, crime wave over. Am I wrong?”

Dave wasn’t wrong. If anything, he didn’t go far enough. This was an election year, and politics trumped everything. The DA had been in office since there were trolley cars and had reached the limit of his wear-out factor. But he wasn’t quite ready for a drool cup and lap robe. There was one last hurrah on his to-do list before going gently into that good night. A high-profile case could be just the ticket. And Dave, the reigning Hell’s Kitchen Kingpin of Crime, fit the bill very nicely.

“You pretty much summed it up,” I said.

“My lawyer tells me that an indictment is about to come down.”

“Not good.”

“Not good at all. What’s worse is that my life has turned into a line from a telemarketing commercial.”

“What do you mean?”

“
‘But wait, there’s more!’
I think something’s going on. A pattern, like. And the fire is just a piece of it. Someone’s moving into the Kitchen. Muscling bookies, ripping off poker games, and playing general fuckaround. They haven’t hit any of my operations yet, but I get the feeling it’s right around the corner.”

“What do your guys say?”

“So far? Nothing. Nobody’s got a line on these guys. Could be the guineas, the spics, the Russians, or some other flavor of asshole thinking about trying me on for size. Since the, uh, incident”—he stroked his cheek with the stump of his hand—“the jokers probably think I’m, you know, vulnerable. But they don’t know who they’re fucking with, do they?”

“I don’t want to know about it.”

He smiled a crooked smile. “Whatever. But I’ll tell you this. When I find them, I’m going to rip out their eyes and use ’em for marbles.”

Nothing ever changes.

“Have you heard from Franny?” I said.

His face went cold.

“Like I said, I need
you
, Jake. Just you and me together. Just like old times.”

Just like old times.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2008 by Ira Berkowitz

All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.crownpublishing.com

Three Rivers Press and the Tugboat design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Berkowitz, Ira.
Old flame: a Jackson Steeg novel / Ira Berkowitz.—1st ed.
1. Ex–police officers—New York (State)—New York—Fiction. 2. Friends—Fiction. 3. Gangsters—Fiction. 4. New York (N.Y.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3602.E7573O43 2008
813'.6—dc22                                    2008005177

eISBN: 978-0-307-45013-5

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