William Brown - The Undertaker

I felt the truck stop and awoke with a start. We were in another big parking lot with dozens of other trucks. “Where are we?” I asked.

“A truck stop near Portage, maybe a half hour south of the turnoff to Chicago. I'm getting’ some coffee. You want some, George?”

I reached in my pocket and handed him one of Dannmeyer's twenty-dollar bills. “Here, my treat. The coffee's all I need, but if you're going, bring us back a box of donuts. And would you mind if I use your computer for a few minutes?” I asked as I pulled the three flash drives from inside my pants pocket.

“No problem. Looks like you know what you're doing with that thing, so as they say, mi casa, es su casa, amigo.”

A computer. I beamed as if I had run into and old, dear friend. The laptop was already booted-up, so I slipped Louie's drive #1 into the USB port. Immediately, “ACCESS DENIED” popped up on the screen. I let my fingers do the walking and tried the obvious things to open the disk's directory. Same result, “ACCESS DENIED.” I tried “Run.” I tried “Setup.” I tried “Browse.” I tried getting in through DOS and all the other little tricks I knew, but nothing worked. Same thing for the other two disks. Each one had a file encryption program in place.

Wanna play games, eh, Louie? I muttered to myself. Not to worry. You can run, but you can't hide, not from me, anyway, because I know just the kind of can opener that will pop these babies open.

The blue icon on the laptop showed that a Wi-Fi system was in range, so I clicked on it and quickly found myself out on line. I went to Google and typed in “Data Encryption Satan.” I had used “Satan” many times before and it would open almost any data lock this side of the CIA or the National Security Agency, some more quickly than others, but it would find all the little back doors and wormholes. To download the program, I needed $299, and I couldn't think of a better use for Louie Panozzo's “George Deevers” MasterCard. In less than a minute, I had Satan downloading to the laptop. I figured the credit card linked to some secret bank account that neither Tinkerton, the FBI, nor the mafia knew anything about it. Even if I was wrong, even if they had an alert out on the card, they would have a hell of a time tracing it to this truck and finding it before I got off in Chicago.

The download was finished when Marty opened the door and handed me four big chocolate covered donuts and a cup of hot coffee. “You all set, sport?” he asked.

“Good to go, “I smiled at him. “If you don't mind, I'm going to keep playing with this thing for a few minutes.”

“That's okay by me. Like I said, it looks like you ain't no stranger to a computer, so knock yourself out.”

He put the big White in gear and drove off as I opened the “Satan” program and turned my attention to the first flash drive. From the program's start-up menu, I clicked the box for “Permanently De-Crypt All Files,” and hit “Enter.” Ten minutes later, the Directory opened in English and all the files were decrypted. I smiled again. Louie must have been using some simple, off-the-shelf encryption program. That would probably be good enough for a New Jersey bean counter who wanted to keep the Gumbahs from snooping, but if Louie had been a real pro, it could have taken hours.

In the directory, I saw a list of thirty Excel spreadsheets. They included names like, “Bayonne Solid Waster Management,” “Atlantic Tire and Recapping,” “Villa Palazzo Restaurant,” “Santucci Chevrolet,” and the “Ramada Inn, Bayside” in the titles. I'll bet. The file dates on the directory were from 2002 through 2006. Below them were seven other directories. I saw, “Financial Statements,” “Payables,” “Receivables,” and “Account Ledgers.” Below that was, “Pay-Offs ’01–06.” In that happy instant, I knew exactly what I had. I was staring at the financial records of the Santorini Mob's business activities, right up to the point the Gumbas got busted. Some of those companies were undoubtedly illegal, but I could see their tentacles would reach out into dozens and dozens of otherwise legitimate ‘front’ businesses where they invested and laundered the money from their drugs, gambling, prostitution, and protection rackets. And “Payoffs.” This was dynamite.

Louie, I've got you, you fat piece of shit. I've got you and I've finally have some leverage on Ralph McKinley Tinkerton, Esq., too. I have him by the short hairs.

I saved the de-crypted files, put in the second flash drive, and ran the “De-Crypt” routine again. He titled the spreadsheets in this one, “Rapier Imports.” That list was shorter, but the individual spreadsheet files were much larger and layered. I had no idea what “Rapier Imports” was, but I suspected it was a big part of the Santorini Family empire. At the bottom of the list, I saw a directory titled “Deposits.” I clicked on the title and saw a list with names like Grand Cayman, Geneva, Barbados, Bern, Lucerne, Basel, and Lichtenstein. Fantastic! I had a sneaking suspicion these were Santorini's offshore bank accounts.

I saved those too, and tried the third flash drive. This one was titled, “Amalgamated Construction and Building Products.” It was laid out like the others, and there were other files like “Florida Portfolio,” “South Carolina Land Deal,” “Dallas Buildings,” and Canada Oil Wells.” That was all I needed to see. The Godfather had become a conglomerate. I saved those files too, deleted the “Satan” program from Marty's laptop, and sat back in the seat, grinning like the Cheshire cat.

“You okay, son?” Marty eyed me with some concern. “You hardly touched them donuts I got you.”

“I will now,” I said, taking a big mouthful of the first one, quickly devouring it and three others.

“Get what you wanted off the laptop?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah, I got that and a whole lot more.” From being down and out and on the run, I felt a huge adrenaline rush. This was power, real power, if I could figure out how to use it. There was enough here to take down Ralph McKinley Tinkerton and the rest of them, and be positively bulletproof in the process.

I looked up and saw we were leaving I-65, getting on the long entrance ramp to the Chicago Skyway. That was where the rust belt of northwest Indiana met the southern extremities of the City of Chicago. We rode up and over a tall, six-lane bridge that spanned the Calumet River. From the top, I saw the city's magnificent skyline laying in an arc ahead of us like a picture postcard. I saw the Sears Tower, the Hancock Building, and dozens of other skyscrapers in the clear, early-morning air twenty miles to the north.

“Where you want me to drop you?” the driver asked.

“Anywhere. I don't want to put you out; you've done enough already.”

“You're not putting me out. There's no traffic yet anyway.”

I pointed toward the big buildings. “Downtown, then. I can get a bus from there.”

“Downtown it is,” he smiled as we entered the city and rolled down the ramp to the Dan Ryan Expressway. Marty eased the big rig over into the Express Lanes. The Local Lanes were three lanes wide and the Express Lanes had another four. Next to us, running down the center of the big expressway was a big mass transit line.

“That's the El tracks,” Marty said, pointing out his window. “They're named for the old elevated railway that used to loop around downtown.”

It must carry a lot of people, I thought, because every half-mile or so a long, concrete station sat in the expressway median. It had a roof and a long flight of stairs coming down from the cross street up above. There were several dozen people standing on the platform waiting for the train. If Chicago was anything like LA, this was probably the safest time of the day. The pimps, drug dealers, and gang-bangers weren't early risers and never came out this early. The people who did were either very old or very young, mostly women, looking tired, expressionless, sullen, and all black.