Reckoning (3 page)

Dartley didn’t know how much of this to believe, but it didn’t matter. “Tell me what happened.”

“It was black tar that done him,” Joe said. “Frank couldn’t handle it. No one could who didn’t know it. I don’t know how much
heroin he was using by that time, but I suppose he was kinda strung out on it. He can’t have been doing too much though, because
a dose of ten milligrams, only five percent pure or less, costs twenty-four bucks.”

“How much is ten milligrams of black tar?”

“Two dollars and fifty cents, and it’s sixty to seventy percent pure. It can be anything from ten to forty times more powerful
than regular street heroin, which is cut with lactose and all kinds of garbage.”

“So it’s one-tenth the price and at least ten times more powerful,” Dartley said. “Why don’t the sellers dilute it?”

“They can’t,” Joe told him. “It’s called black tar because it’s hard and solid, like roofing tar. It’s not a powder, like
ordinary heroin is. It’s hard and not easy to cut with something cheap and harmless, like regular cocaine is. But black tar
dissolves easy in heated water for shooting up.”

Dartley had heard that this new form of heroin had come on the market when farmers in the Mexican states of Sinaloa, Sonora
and Durango had started processing their own opium poppy crops. Their method was crude and simple, but it brought them vastly
increased profits because they were now delivering a street-ready product instead of just raw material to organized crime
refiners who up to now had been making most of the profits.

“What happened to Frank?” Dartley asked.

“He didn’t know the power of what he was getting. That’s my guess. Stuff might’ve been ninety percent pure. Me and some other
guys saw him in a playground, lying on the ground inside the wire fence. He’d OD’d but he was still alive. We lifted him up
by the arms and tried to make him walk. We slapped his face and yelled at him. His eyes were half open and he was breathing
real slow. A cop car saw us and brought us down to the emergency room at St. Vincent’s. I phoned Mr. Leeson, but Frank was
dead by the time his father got there. I think he was gone before we reached the hospital.”

“Dan Leeson says the pusher did it deliberately.”

“I told him that,” Joe admitted. “I’ll know the dude when I see him”—he shrugged—“which is why I’m here, I suppose. Soon as
he shows, I’ll know him. I’ve been watching him a long while. I heard about three others who died from his stuff. He gives
someone some super strong shit, stays to watch him take a hit and then takes off when he starts to OD. There’s guys
who get a big turn on from that—fucking someone over.”

Dartley guessed that Joe was high on something right at this moment. He had probably taken something to cool him out while
he was waiting and watching. Dartley surmised that Joe was only cooperating because Dan Leeson had threatened him. If Joe
had been able to read Dartley’s mind, he would have been in need of something to tranquilize him, because Dartley was seriously
considering taking him out along with the pusher. A strung-out kid like this would tell anyone what they needed to know—all
they needed to do was stand between him and his minimal daily requirement. Joe had to go. Dartley couldn’t afford him. Leeson
wouldn’t give a fuck once he had his dead pusher. But Dartley wouldn’t do it here in the apartment. He’d put Joe in the Hudson
or East River. That way he could relax and be sure.

Leeson had heard about this dealer from others. No one knew his name—not even a street name. He was white, tall, thin, bushy
hair, sometimes bearded or mustached, sometimes clean shaven. He had a bad reputation for cutting drugs with strychnine and
pulling other weird stunts to cut people up. Leeson had been tempted to waste him himself—he was half set to do a Bronson
Death Wish
type of thing—until he thought of Dartley. Dartley would do it for him and he could get himself a firm alibi. To have to
do ten years for whacking out the dealer who had killed his son—that was no kind of revenge.

Dartley of course had agreed. Leeson was convinced that Dartley was a mercenary, a soldier of fortune. He had no idea that
his old buddy was way beyond that—the highest paid professional assassin in the world. Dartley was a man who did not stir
out unless his fee of a million bucks was prepaid, with additional billing to follow for expenses. Leeson was getting him
for the cost of a spaghetti dinner. The way Dartley saw it, Leeson had paid already with his right leg.

Joe pointed out the window. Two black teenagers stood on the corner. One went to use the public phone there. He hung up and
they waited.

“They been run out of Washington Square with the police crackdown there,” Joe commented. “They just move west to the streets
and deal in doorways. They’re waiting for their wholesaler now. So long as they carry small amounts, they get charged with
a misdemeanor instead of a felony if they get caught. They pay a hundred-dollar fine or maybe do a few days in the slammer.
Most get off without either because of the heavy traffic down at the courts. New York City only has six judges trying cases—they
can’t keep up with arraignments, forget trials. They have to plea bargain by getting someone to plead guilty to a lesser charge.
If you refuse to plead guilty and they haven’t got a serious charge against you, they just let you go. There ain’t room in
the jails anyway. For every new one they put in, they have to let an inmate go before his time is up.”

“That what you’re depending on?” Dartley asked.

Joe laughed. “I been caught five times but never charged. So long as I keep the amount I carry down, I’m safe in this city.”
He looked out the window at the two youths on the opposite sidewalk. “I don’t know these two. But that phone is a favorite
call post for everyone. You’re going to see their wholesaler any moment now. They’ll have reached him on his phone beeper
and he’ll be around to resupply them. He’ll be carrying big amounts, so he won’t be sticking around long.”

Dartley was ready when the car pulled into the street and came to a slow stop. A heavyset black man got out and looked warily
around him. Dartley and Joe watched him complete a transaction with the two youths and leave fast. Twenty minutes later, three
others called another dealer. He wasn’t the one Dartley was looking for either. Then the first two called the first dealer
again. Business was good. When a police car passed, the loiterers move along.

“We could be here for days,” Joe complained.

“Okay by me,” Dartley snapped.

Joe shut up. Whenever he recognized someone, he told Dartley about him. Most were into crack or pot. “Him,” Joe said, pointing
to a white kid about seventeen, who was shiftily moving next to a mailbox and taking long looks at it like he hadn’t seen
one before. “He deals with our man.”

“Will he sell to you?”

“If he has anything,” Joe said. “But he don’t look like he’s holding.”

Dartley handed him five twenties. “Go down and buy all the black tar he has, so he will need to call for more. If he hasn’t
any, give him the money to make a buy for you. Say you’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“I may never see him again.”

“Do it any way you like. Get down there fast.”

Dartley saw Joe emerge onto the street and cross to where the junkie was now studying the pickup times posted on the mailbox.
They talked and Joe handed him the money. The junkie went to the phone while Joe came back. Dartley rechecked the rifle sights.

Joe had been back at the window only a short while when a black Cadillac Seville cruised along the edge of the sidewalk. The
junkie leaned on the mailbox, watching it. The car stopped short of him. The front door opened and a tall, thin man, with
bushy hair and a
Miami Vice
kind of suit, stepped out of the Caddy.

“That’s him,” Joe said. “He killed Frank.”

Dartley looped the HK91’s sling around his left elbow, set the bipod firmly on the windowsill and held the cross-hairs on
the center of the dealer’s narrow chest. As he was about to squeeze off the shot, a bunch of women banging with spoons on
pots and pans suddenly surrounded the dealer and the junkie. They took Dartley by as much surprise as they did the dopers.

“Damn! I can’t risk a shot in case of a richochet!”

Joe said in a complaining voice, “They’re a neighborhood association. They spoil everything.”

Dartley wasn’t listening. He snapped closed the bipods against the rifle stock and lay the weapon in its carrying case. He
snapped the lid shut and headed out the door. The elevator wasn’t there, so he. ran down the stairs.

When he came out of the building, the women were banging on the Caddy’s hood with their heavy frying pans. They weren’t denting
the metal but it must be playing hell with the paintwork, Dartley thought. The junkie had taken off and the dealer was behind
the steering wheel, beginning to ease the car forward out of the crowd of indignant women. No doubt he could not afford to
give the police any cause to search his vehicle, and he was being careful not to hit any of the women.

Dartley ran along the sidewalk to where he saw a kid standing next to his Stump Jumper mountain bike. Dartley whacked him
in the gut with a corner of the aluminum carrying case. The kid was soft and crumpled like a wet paper bag.

The Cadillac passed him as he pedaled along. The open side window exposed the dealer’s head and shoulder to him, but Dartley
chose not to attack in front of the pots-and-pans brigade of witnesses. The car made the light at Jefferson Library, turned
into Sixth Avenue and waited in traffic at the uptown red light.

Brakes squealed and a car swerved to avoid Dartley as he rode the expensive competition bike onto the avenue like a bat out
of hell, steering with one hand,
carrying the case with the other. He wove in and out of traffic and zoomed along between the lines of cars stopped at the
light. The Caddy’s window was still down, and the bushy-haired guy looked out at him with his dealer’s constant wariness and
sixth sense for trouble. Dartley stopped the bike and took his right hand off the handlebar.

“This is for Frank Leeson,” he snarled, hauling a 9 mm Smith & Wesson Model 39 pistol from his shoulder holster. He hammered
home two of the gun’s rounds into the dealer’s head, one high in his right temple, the other below his right cheekbone. The
dealer’s eyes rolled back in his head and he slumped slowly forward.

The light changed to green and traffic surged forward. Riding along, several blocks north, Dartley could still hear irritated
drivers sounding their horns behind the stationery Cadillac in the middle of Sixth Avenue.

Herbert Malleson, an Englishman, was nicknamed “the Viscount” for his posh accent and lordly ways. However, Malleson still
had to earn his daily bread, like nearly everyone else. Information was his specialty. A graduate of Oxford and Harvard Law
School, this naturalized American was well known as the author of books on personalities as different as Gloria Vanderbilt,
Josef Stalin, Huey Long and Jack the Ripper. He had written several studies on the pro-Nazi tendencies of British aristocrats
in the 1930s. Among a small minority of knowledgeable people, Malleson was also known for the far reach of his computers.
He seemed to have a magic touch for plugging into supposedly inaccessible data bases. He was interconnected with dozens of
hackers’ networks and had a vast information library of his own which he constantly updated.

Richard Dartley depended on Malleson to answer all those questions which had a findable answer, and
also to provide him with answers to questions he had not thought to ask. Charley Woodgate and Malleson were old friends. Malleson
shared Charley’s worries that Dartley was becoming increasingly coldblooded. In a way, both men felt that in helping to form
this professional assassin, they had gone beyond the point of justification. How much was Richard Dartley his own man? How
much was he a monster of their creation? They couldn’t tell, and neither, they suspected, could Dartley, who just laughed
at any discussion of this kind.

“It seems a little farfetched and mad, even for the Iranians, to hunt down these oilmen for giving some information to the
Iraqis,” Malleson concluded after Woodgate and Dartley told him all they knew. “Give me the name of your contacts at the World
American Oil Company and Global Hydrocarbons, so I can check into their stories. I don’t trust oil companies. Do you? I think
I can find what really happened.”

Dartley nodded. “Assuming what they say is true, I need you to find me a way in. There are ten men on that list. When we first
heard about it, four were already dead, with six to go. With the news of Leonard Hill’s death off Cape Cod, that makes it
five down and five to go before I even get started.”

“They don’t mind killing women and kids either,” Charley Woodgate remarked. “Last thing that naturalist on the whale-watching
boat noticed before he lost consciousness was Hill’s son fiddling with his cassette player and the exploding light coming
from him. Federal
and state experts agree from the remains that Hill’s son was closest to the blast, although so far they’ve found no traces
of any device.”