Michael Ledwidge - Alert

Mr. Beckett sighed silently at this disrespect. These kids today. He’d been doing business with the psychopathic Chechen crook for the last year. The least he could do was acknowledge Mr. Beckett’s existence, but alas, no.

Many people were afraid of the twenty-five-year-old, but Mr. Beckett — not only an experienced connoisseur of dangerous people but also a dangerous person himself — did not fall into that category.

Senturk was a problem, without question, but Ahmed was sloppy, often high, and always distracted.

He could, to borrow an expression from an American book he had once read, swallow the slight, girlish fop with a glass of water.

“Ahmed? Yoo-hoo,” Mr. Beckett finally said after a long two minutes.

“Well, my friend, what brings you by for a face-to-face? You miss me? Ha-ha... of course you do. We still have some of that beautiful new Ecstasy from Denmark. Plenty of it. All you want,” Ahmed said.

Mr. Beckett glanced to his left at Senturk standing back by the inside of the interior door, just out of earshot. Good. He slowly crossed a leg as he leaned back in his chair.

“The Ecstasy was excellent, but I don’t need that. I need what we spoke of on the phone, Ahmed. Remember that item I ordered about three months ago?”

“Come, now,” Ahmed said, frowning. “Please, I told you that that fell through, remember?”

“I remember, Ahmed. I don’t mind if you want to negotiate, but I’m in a hurry, so you win. I’ll double your fee.”

“You don’t understand. It was seized,” Ahmed said as he took a rolled joint out of a cigarette box on his table and lit it with a match.

He tossed the burned match into a filthy crystal ashtray and shrugged.

“That’s the risk,” he said, blowing ganja smoke up at the twenty-foot-high ceiling.

“I know all about risk,” Mr. Beckett said. “I also know that one of your cousins who does your smuggling for you came in on a Nigerian freighter out of the Canary Islands last week. He had a large bag with him when he jumped ship off the coast of Coney Island. It was filled with twenty-seven pounds of C-four plastic explosive. You have it here. Now trot it out, and let’s do business.”

“How do you know this?” Ahmed said in surprise, putting the joint down. “Scratch that. I don’t care. That wasn’t your shipment. That was for another client. I can’t help you. Honestly. You need to be going now. I have some girls coming over.”

“You don’t seem to understand,” said Mr. Beckett calmly as he reached over and took a long puff on Ahmed’s joint. “Here’s what you’re going to do now. You’re going to tell your other client that his shipment was seized, and then you’re going to sell his product to me. Simple, okay? Now get off your ass and go get me what I want like a good little boy.”

Ahmed sat up in his chair, a dark look on his face, a deeper darkness in his eyes.

“Senturk, can you believe the balls on this fat bastard? No one talks to me like that. Throw this asshole down the stairs. Hard.”

“My apologies,” said Mr. Beckett in fluent Chechen, smiling. “We’ve gotten off on the wrong foot. I know the friends you ordered the plastic for. We have the same friends. We are all on the same side here, Ahmed. Don’t you see? I’m the one who bombed the subway and killed the mayor and set off the EMP. That was me.”

The young punk’s jaw dropped.

“You?” said Ahmed in dismay.

Mr. Beckett nodded.

“Yours truly,” he said. “And the plastic is needed to continue our campaign. We are on the same righteous path.”

The kid thought about it. You had to give him that. He sat nodding to himself. He wasn’t that dumb. Then he shook his head.

Mr. Beckett was up and rolling over the desk faster than the kid could kick out from behind it. They went to the floor in a heap. When they stood, Mr. Beckett had the punk by his curly hair and the ceramic knife he’d hidden in his belt to the kid’s throat.

“I’ll cut him!” Mr. Beckett exploded at the bodyguard, who had his gun out and trained. “I’ll open his carotid artery and write my name on this wall in his spraying blood! Get me my explosives now!”

“You’ve made a mistake,” the evil little Chechen hissed. “Cut my throat and Senturk will blow your fat head off and cut off your balls. You don’t know who you’re fucking with.”

“That makes two of us, I guess,” Mr. Beckett said as he finally saw what he’d been waiting for.

It was a refreshing sight, all right.

Mr. Joyce, having picked the locks of the building and apartment doors, stood silently behind Senturk with a suppressed Mossberg 500 in his hand.

Mr. Beckett dove to the floor behind the desk with Ahmed again as the shooting started. The report of the suppressed shotgun was almost musical, like a cymbal shaken in a blanket. Mr. Beckett stuck his head back up after four clangs and smiled.

Senturk, the giant, now looked like a pile of bloody laundry dumped on the floor.

“Where is it? You have it here. We know you never leave here. Where the fuck is it, you little twerp?” said Mr. Joyce, putting the hot metal barrel of the shotgun to Ahmed’s forehead.

“Screw you maniacs. I am willing to be martyred!” said Ahmed as he tried lamely to push off Mr. Beckett’s iron grip.

“I thought you might say something like that,” said Mr. Joyce as he shrugged off the backpack he was wearing. He took something bulky out of it and clunked it onto the desk.

“Let us test your faith, shall we?” Mr. Joyce said as he plugged in the home-kitchen meat-slicing machine they’d just bought from Bed Bath & Beyond.

Ahmed pissed himself as Mr. Beckett chocked his hand into the meat holder, inches from the spinning, shining stainless steel circular blade.

“It’s in the bedroom closet!” said Ahmed, weeping. “Please! In the upstairs closet — I swear!”

“What a pigsty, Ahmed. Didn’t your mommy ever teach you how to make your bed?” Mr. Joyce said after he came down from the bedroom with the duffel bag full of explosives a minute later.

“Please, I can help. I have money. Millions in cash. You know that. I want to help you!” Ahmed said as he dropped out of Mr. Beckett’s grip onto his knees.

“You want to help?” Mr. Joyce said.

“Yes, of course. Please,” Ahmed said, still weeping.

“Then don’t move an inch,” Mr. Joyce said, and he raised the shotgun one-handed and shot Ahmed point-blank in the face.

Under normal circumstances, Peter Luger Steak House, an old redbrick Brooklyn landmark, would have been a sight for sore eyes.

But nothing is even close to normal, I thought as I pulled into the parking lot across from its famous brown awning.

Emily and I weren’t there to chow down on some USDA Prime but to meet up with Chief Fabretti. They’d put the mayor in the ground at Queens’s Calvary Cemetery this morning, and a lot of brass and pols had gathered with the mayor’s family at his favorite restaurant after the service.

Still too busy scouring through everything we’d found at al Gharsi’s to attend the service, Emily and I had watched snatches of it broadcast live on TV. Several thousand people had attended, including the vice president.

Watching Mayor Doucette’s bright American flag — draped coffin being brought through the cemetery gates on a horse-drawn carriage, I couldn’t stop shaking my head.

I also couldn’t stop thinking about the rousing speech he’d given right before he’d been shot and how he’d bravely insisted on holding the speech outside to help the city heal. Though the sun was shining, it was one very dark day for the city.