Jason Pinter - The Darkness

“Thanks, Edgar,” Jack said. “Come on, Henry.” He didn’t say my name like we were partners, but like I was his subordinate.

As we left the building, I said to Jack, “Next time you’re going to do the good cop, bad cop shtick, how about letting me know ahead of time that I’m going to be the bad cop?”

Jack shook his head. “This is about the story, Henry.

Not your pride or your feelings. If I need you to be my patsy to get someone to open up, that’s just what I’ll do.

And I’d expect you to do the same with me if the situation called for it. In fact, if you didn’t, I’d wonder why I was letting you tag along in the first place.”

“Tag along? This is my sto…” I stopped talking. This wouldn’t get us anywhere. “I can tell what you’re thinking.”

Jack nodded. “Whoever did work here packed up and left faster than my second wife left with my collection of antique pens.”

“You think it’s because of Tsang?” I asked.

“No way. At least not entirely. Tsang was killed yesterday. Edgar started a few days ago. If Tsang was connected to 718 Enterprises-and ipso facto your brother-they were long gone before they crushed his bones into oatmeal.”

I don’t know what we should have expected to find, but I guarantee it wasn’t nothing. Not the nothing as in

“well, we got there but didn’t quite find what we were looking for.” There was no trace of 718 Enterprises whatsoever. It was simply gone.

And as Jack and I stood there in the morning sunlight,

I couldn’t help but think about the hundreds of people who went about their day oblivious to this. Who’d walked by this building for perhaps years, unaware that it was a drug refueling station. And that all of a sudden whatever had been there had suddenly been packed up and shipped off as quickly and as easily as a parcel.

“Back to the office,” Jack said. “We’re not going to learn anything standing on the corner waiting for melanoma to sink in.”

His hands were on his hips, a look on his face that showed he was pissed off but wouldn’t stop here. I’d never seen Jack work, unless you counted watching him hunched over a keyboard sipping coffee that smelled suspiciously like something you’d find on tap at an Irish pub.

I had the same gene. The “hell if I’ll stop now” gene.

I smiled inwardly as Jack ran into the street to hail a cab, moving like a man half his age. Not only did he have a story to chase, but after months spent away from the game, this was the closest he’d been to fresh meat in a long time.

“There has to be a building manager,” I said. “A corporation who cashes the lease payments.”

“Great minds, Henry. Great minds.” He told the driver to take us back to Rockefeller Plaza. I felt my cell phone vibrate, picked it up, saw Amanda had left me a text message. I opened the mail. It read, Luv u. I smiled. Sent her one back that read, u 2 babe.

Then just before I closed the phone, I saw that I had another unopened text. This one was from Curt Sheffield.

It read: News out about Ken Tsang’s murder. Undercover cops say dealers are scared shitless, holing up.

Informants running like roaches.

And the text ended with one line that gave me chills.

Message delivered.

Morgan Isaacs didn’t want to wake up. He was lying in bed, forcing his eyelids closed, even though a few quick peeks told him it was after ten o’clock and the day had started without him. Again.

It had been just a week since Morgan had met with the real estate broker as well as his dad’s accountant (who didn’t charge him, thankfully, chalking it up to years of family service). Both advised him, without a moment of hesitation, to sell his two-bedroom apartment on Park

Avenue. Morgan pleaded his case, said he’d be back on his feet in no time, but Morgan wasn’t trying to convince the advisor as much as himself.

He’d have to give it up. All of it.

It was a sweet pad, with nearly seventeen hundred square feet, brand-new appliances, a hundred-fiftysquare-foot terrace, a fifty-two-inch plasma and a view that most Manhattanites would chop off their left thumb for. It was the kind of place Morgan dreamed of when he first enrolled in business school five years ago, taking on the kind of debt that would choke a third world country.

Sure, there were bigger apartments in NYC, but you had to start somewhere. And even with the real estate market taking a nosedive recently you couldn’t find a good twobedroom for under a million three. To get the three-and four-bedroom pads you had to plunk down close to two mil, and even though his debts were almost all paid off he thankfully had decided to stick with the twofer until his next promotion.

But then it all crashed down faster than a load of bricks.

The rumors began to swirl about a month ago that the bank Morgan worked at as a trader was having tough times, that its liquidity was nowhere near what the CEOs were claiming. Then he read a newspaper article saying there was a chance it would be bought out by one of the company’s competitors. Then, a week ago, Morgan got a call from his boss at eleven-thirty on a Saturday night, telling him to be at the office at 9:00 a.m. Sunday morning.

Morgan was there, dressed in a suit and carrying his briefcase, unsure of what to expect. When he got to the conference room he was informed, along with several dozen of his colleagues, that the firm’s equity had been bought for five cents a share, that the employee stock purchase plan was essentially worthless. Oh yeah, and that they were all out of a job. They would not be permitted back to their desks, and any personal items would be mailed to their forwarding addresses.

Morgan blinked. It was all he could do. They would receive one month’s severance for each year they’d been with the company. For Morgan, that was three months.

Three months that would cover his mortgage and BMW payments until he could find a new job. Surely that wouldn’t be hard. He had his MBA, his CFA, and had graduated from Wharton in the top five percent of his class.

Whether that severance would pay for the nearly thirty-three thousand dollars in credit card debt he’d racked up…he didn’t even want to think about it. Uncle

Sam giveth, and Morgan would be damned if he’d let

Uncle Sam taketh away.

Then the next day another bank closed. And suddenly the terrifying realization hit Morgan that he would be competing for jobs in a market where opportunities had just been halved, and his competition increased by two hundred percent. In less than a month there were nearly twenty thousand young men and women just like him, many of whom were just as qualified if not more, looking for the same opportunities he was.

Suddenly those monthly payments, over eleven thousand a month, loomed like a pile of bricks about to rain down on his head.

He went out that night to a dive bar in his neighborhood, fully intent on getting stinking drunk and hooking up with whatever girl noticed the two grand in jewelry he wore. Brianna be damned, she was going to break up with him anyway. He had no illusions about why she was with him. She didn’t care about cuddling or having doors opened for her. She wanted the gold. Literally.

Just like Morgan, Brianna would be getting a severance package, maybe a small diamond necklace, no more than a grand. Morgan was a big fan of The Sopranos, and he always thought Tony was brilliant for giving his jilted paramours a small token when he divested himself of them. The kind of women who dated Tony Soprano were the kind of women who dated Morgan Isaacs; they loved the money, the power (granted with Morgan it was on a slightly smaller scale). Once Brianna learned the truth, she’d be gone and in the pocket-and pants-of some upper manager who managed to hold on to his sevenfigure job.