Steven Gore - Final Target

Gage covered the mouthpiece and turned to Faith. “Mickey’s been hurt.”

“Gravilov’s thugs,” Hixon Two continued. “Hammer and Britva. Ribs, right arm, right eye socket, jaw, a gash on his forehead.”

Gage winced at the image. “How did it-”

“He enjoyed the taste of work again, so he went out on his own.”

“I never should’ve-”

“Don’t blame yourself. He said you’d do that.”

“What was he thinking? These are dangerous people.”

“He was thinking that maybe he’d learn something that would help you. He started following Gravilov, but they led him into a trap. Azenby Road is a tiny street that dead ends at Warwick Gardens. He was trapped.”

“Can I talk to him?”

“He’s still under. They went in to find the source of internal bleeding and they’ll wire his jaw. I could tell he learned something, but they raced him into surgery before he could finish.”

Gage disconnected the call and remained sitting on the edge of the couch.

“Mickey thought he was invisible,” he told Faith, “like lost keys.” He felt himself well up. “I never should’ve gotten him into this.”

“It’s not your fault. The little jobs you gave him made him feel important, still useful in the world.”

Gage turned toward her. “But I always made sure somebody younger and stronger was with him.”

“He never realized it, did he?”

Gage shook his head. “I didn’t want to hurt his feelings…For something like this, he should’ve called me to come do it, not tried it himself.”

“Maybe he didn’t want to look stupid if he was wrong.”

“Sometimes it’s not worth being right.”

H ixon Two called back early the next morning, catching Gage on the drive down the hill toward the flatlands and the Bay Bridge.

“He’s got a sparkle in his eye and is quite proud of himself.” The worry was gone from her voice.

“Wait till the painkillers wear off.”

“I don’t think it’ll make a difference.”

“Can he talk?”

“Yes, but he sounds like he has a lisping Chinese accent from a 1940s film. He kept saying he ‘crowsht a shirkle.’”

“Closed a circle? What’d he mean?”

“Get this.” She paused as she’d been instructed by Mickey to set Gage up for the surprise. “He spotted Gravilov coming out of Alla’s building three days ago.”

“Now that’s what I would call closing a circle.” The black hole left by Fitzhugh had been filled with Alla Tarasova. He paused, trying to visualize the possible orbits, then thought out loud. “Either she’s now Matson’s proxy or she’s got a separate deal with Gravilov. Maybe Slava is right, she and her father are working with Gravilov.”

But that was all step two. Step one was still Mickey.

“Do you think Gravilov had any idea why Mickey was following them? SatTek can’t be the only scam he’s got running.”

“No way to tell. They just beat him up and warned him not to talk. That’s it.”

After Hixon Two rang off, Gage found himself lost in circles. There were too many threads doubling back on each other, and he couldn’t get his head clear. He decided it was time to go beat on something. He cut off the freeway at the last exit before the bridge and headed east.

Twenty minutes later, Stymie Jackson came limping out of his East Oakland gym office. Gage had just slipped on his bag gloves. The sixty-eight-year-old former middleweight contender waved to Gage, then pulled up a stool next to the heavy bag.

“Where ya been?” he asked Gage. “You missed a few weeks.”

“A friend of mine is in a little trouble.”

Over thirty years since Stymie had first trained Gage for the police Olympics, he had learned never to ask Gage for details. He reached for the stopwatch hanging on a lanyard around his neck, and nodded.

Gage threw two left jabs and then a right uppercut that made the hundred-and-thirty-pound bag jump three inches.

“That’s it. Stick it. Jab, jab, power jab. Come on. Jab, jab, power jab. Step into it. Jab, jab, power jab.”

The word “trouble” echoed back. Gage then realized that there was something that had drawn him there. “My trouble” was the phrase Stymie always used to describe the day in the late fifties when he refused to take a fall in a fight. Chicago gangsters mangled his right leg as punishment, both for the money they’d lost and for not keeping his mouth shut. Stymie used to tell Gage: They was telling me that everybody’d be betting against me like crazy on the next fight expecting me to lose-and they’d let me win. The bad guys said it was for the good of the game. But their game really wasn’t boxing, it was something else.

Gage stopped punching. He wiped his brow with the backs of his bag gloves, then glanced around the empty gym. Speed bags still. Ring empty. Jump ropes hung on hooks. A thought was lurking in his mind, but it was still too deep to dredge.

“Did I say it’s time to stop?” Stymie looked down at his stopwatch. “You got forty-five seconds left. Come on, stick it.”

Gage got back into the rhythm, then switched to a series of straight rights. The phrase “for the good of the game” repeated itself with each punch. For the thump of the game, for the thump of the game, for the thump of the game.

“Stop.”

Gage slipped a towel off a worn wooden bench, gripped it between his gloves, and wiped the sweat from his face. He wondered whether the mobsters would’ve let Stymie keep fighting if he’d kept silent; just a broken leg, not a mangled one that destroyed his career.

Maybe that’s it, Gage thought as he stared at the still swinging bag. Then the answer arrived in Stymie’s voice: So what if Matson’s talkin’? He ain’t talkin’ about things the bad guys don’t want him talkin’ about.

But Gage didn’t have a clue what that was.

G age called Alex Z into his office after driving in from Stymie’s.

“What’s up, boss?” Alex Z said as he dropped into a chair.

Gage got up from behind his desk and walked to an easel, marker in hand.

“I need your help thinking this through.”

He started a fresh charting of the players, drawing arrows showing the known relationships.

“We know how everybody connects together except for Matson, Alla, and Gravilov,” Gage said, then stepped back from the chart.

“Three people can all meet each other in six different sequences,” Alex Z said, shaking his head. “And when you factor in all of the rest, you spin off into infinity.”

“That’s exactly the problem,” Gage said. “Too many moving parts.”

Alex Z made a show of looking around the office. At the bookcases lined with files, the fireproof safes anchored to the floor, and a network server containing millions of scanned documents. “I thought those were the only kinds of cases you did.”

“But this one we need to simplify before it gets away from us.”

Gage crossed his arms across his chest. “Let’s start at the beginning. Who introduced whom?” He glanced at Alex Z’s SatTek chronology hanging from the wall, then back at the chart. “Matson travels to London just before the IPO, he hooks up with Alla…or she hooks up with him…Why? Was she looking to snag him? Or maybe they meet by chance…In any case, he brags. He says ‘I’ve got an IPO coming up,’ and she calls Budapest to tell her gangster daddy.” Gage pointed at the lines connecting Matson, Alla, and Gravilov. “What did Granger say?… Sometimes children grow up and do things you never expected in your wildest imagination…Gage looked at Alex Z. “What does Granger do when he figures it out-whatever it was? Nothing. Absolutely nothing. He’s unhappy, maybe about not getting a cut, but he has to keep his mouth shut. He can’t snitch off Matson without snitching off himself.”