Authors: Norb Vonnegut
The Trust (42 page)
Up in the air, your mind plays games. You’re either looking over your shoulder or wondering what’s waiting on the other side.
* * *
The angry diners swept Bong and Jake into the street. The two men were bleeding, the pilot from his broken nose and Bong from his pulpy eye. They had expected to trade punches with the crowd. But to each one’s surprise, the fury was aimed at O’Rourke.
“Get him.” Jake pointed at the stockbroker, who bolted pell-mell for the bank.
The mob chased O’Rourke down the street. Bong never moved as the swarm jostled past.
“Come on,” Jake screamed at Bong.
“Forget it.”
“He’s got our money.”
“O’Rourke was right. Your brain is toast, man.”
Jake bristled forward, his stance smug and menacing, the serrated knife in his right hand. “And you’re a regular George fucking Clooney. You want the other eye to match?”
Bong, no matter his severe injuries, was still capable. He poked his index finger into the pilot’s chest. “Game’s over. We gotta get out of here.”
Jake backed off, unnerved by entrails and socket. “What about the money?”
“What about twenty years?”
“Moreno’s gonna be pissed.”
“I’ll get the money. Is your plane fueled up?”
“Yeah, of course.”
“Let’s go.”
“Your eye looks like shit.” It made Jake wince.
“O’Rourke’s a dead man.”
The two men stopped at the house first. Bong shredded a clean white bedsheet and bandaged his eye. The blood stopped flowing. And his face stopped throbbing after he downed a few painkillers, which were never in short supply in his line of work. Forty-five minutes elapsed before the two men took off in the battered old seaplane.
“You need to get that thing checked out,” said Jake. “I’m telling you, man. It looked like fucking Cyclops.”
“I got resources in Port-au-Prince.”
“You trust their doctors?”
“Yeah.”
“Haiti’s a shit hole.”
“Just take me there.”
The engines droned their lullaby. Bong disappeared into the delicious, satisfying sleep of Vicodin. And Jake manned the controls.
* * *
The battered seaplane was rocking, its back-and-forth motion like a cradle atop the Caribbean waters. The stench of fuel wafted through the cabin. And the cockpit’s temperature climbed under a relentless blaze of midday sun.
Bong could have been asleep for twenty minutes. Or it could have been two days. Looking out the cockpit window through his good eye, he slowly regained his senses. And he didn’t like the view coming into focus. “This isn’t Port-au-Prince.”
“We’re in Jamaica.” Jake was sitting next to him.
“You just wrote your obituary, pal.”
From behind them, someone said, “I don’t think so.” The sentence sounded serpentine, the speaker hissing the word “so” a few seconds longer than necessary.
Bong froze. The slithering
s
’s and bloodless lisp from the bowels of hell cut through his Vicodin haze. He knew that voice. It was unmistakable. It petrified him. “I’ll get your money.”
“Promises, promises.” Moreno’s hair was pulled tight into a long black ponytail. His nose was narrow and hooked, the sharp curve of a scythe. His white shirt was starched, expensive. And he carried himself with a patrician air. But his hands betrayed a rugged past. They were gnarled, too big for him, and too scarred for an office.
From nowhere, two of Moreno’s goons grabbed Bong. They overpowered him and duct-taped his arms. He could almost taste their body odor, the scent of salt and musk. Their breathing, the gasps of exertion, stank of fish and rotten fruit, hints of Mount Gay.
“No,” pleaded Bong.
The bigger of Moreno’s men had arms that looked like howitzers. He wrapped duct tape around and around his captive’s mouth. Subdued and humiliated, Bong was suddenly suffering the violent déjà vu of Grove O’Rourke.
“Jake told me about your party tricks,” said Moreno. “I’m so happy you had some Great Stuff lying around.”
Bong tried to speak. Didn’t work. The duct tape only allowed for nonsense, low guttural gasps that started near the base of his tonsils. His one good eye begged for mercy.
“We’re fishing for shark,” Moreno whispered into his ear. “Just you and me.”
When the spraying began, Bong’s lungs filled with a strong chemical odor. The sticky spray latched onto his molars, tonsils, and the roof of his mouth. He struggled to gag the Great Stuff out. The insulation grew larger and larger, the foam widening and stiffening.
He heard laughing and cackling from the crew, the slithering sound of Moreno’s satanic
s
’s. The foam grew. It fed on itself, expanding in his throat like an explosion from inside out. First the foam became a tennis ball. Then it turned into a cantaloupe. And the sticky substance kept growing and growing, out of control.
Bong’s jaw cracked wide open, his pain unbearable. Even the Vicodin, the glorious Vicodin, lacked impact. Darkness descended over him, though not with sweet decisiveness. The seconds lingered into minutes, the blackness hesitant and excruciating. No air. No light. No more. Moreno finally whispered two words:
“Goodnight, Bong.”
ALSO BY NORB VONNEGUT
Top Producer
The Gods of Greenwich
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
NORB VONNEGUT writes thrillers and nonfiction about Wall Street behind closed doors. He has appeared on
The Dylan Ratigan Show
and Bloomberg News as well as the Laura Ingraham and Judith Regan shows.
Top Producer,
his debut novel, was a featured pick of
Today
and
SmartMoney
and is published in eight languages.
The New York Times
selected his second book,
The Gods of Greenwich,
as a 2011 summer read.
Norb built his wealth-management career with Morgan Stanley and other Wall Street institutions. A Harvard graduate, he splits his time between New York and Rhode Island and is a trustee with the American Foundation for the Blind. Visit
norbvonnegut.com
or
Facebook.com/Norb.Vonnegut.Books
to learn more.
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
A THOMAS DUNNE BOOK FOR MINOTAUR BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Publishing Group.
THE TRUST.
Copyright © 2012 by Norb Vonnegut. All rights reserved. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Cover design by David Baldeosingh Rotstein
Cover photograph of house by Martin Adolfsson
e-ISBN 9781250014771
First Edition: August 2012