PULPWORK PRESS

Chapter One: 

Dead Broke in Denbrook

His first intimation that something was wrong were the double doors, which lay open to the chill October wind. The carved pumpkin on the concrete stoop was a crushed mass of orange pulp, and Damon St. Cloud’s heartbeat sped as he stepped through his front door, his words nearly catching in his throat.

“Myra, Stanton?” he called.

There came no response to his cry, and he tossed aside his jacket and briefcase onto the cluttered bench in the stone-worked foyer. He called again, and veered to the right into the spacious red-tiled kitchen. Steam filled the air, and a thin layer of water at the bottom of a pan boiled furiously. Damon turned off the burner on his way into the bookshelf-lined living room.

What he found wrenched a scream of horror from his lips.

As Damon woke from the dream that he relived so many nights, he found that he was screaming. The paunchy cabby placed a massive left forearm on his seat and turned to glance back at his fare.

“Are you dying or something?”

Damon stifled the scream and felt the cold dream-induced sweat that soaked his body. “Sorry, about that,” he muttered as he formulated an excuse in his mind. “Sometimes I have dreams about Iraq.”

“That was a nasty piece of business,” consoled the cabby. “Sorry you had to be there.”

“We all try to do our part,” said Damon. He pushed back his jet black hair away from his widow’s peak, and in the cab’s rear view mirror he could see the white streak that he had developed that dreadful night in Denbrook.

They crossed the Union City Bridge and Damon could see the familiar Denbrook Tower rising up in the distance. This place brought back the anguish, opening up the wounds and revealing the scars he had attempted to hide and heal in vain.

The sticky filth of the Hopkins River slowly filtered out toward Lake Erie, even as the sticky traffic started to flow again and finally the cabby pulled to a stop in front of the Denbrook Municipal Police Department—a less than impressive looking building with wide, cracked steps that led up to a single glass door, pocked with bullet marks that showed that the glass wasn’t the run of the mill variety, but of a more sturdy stock.

“That will be $83.50,” read the cabby as he punched the meter.

Damon sighed and fished ninety dollars out of his billfold. He handed the wad of green bills to the cabby. “Keep the change.”

“Ya don’t have to twist my arm,” replied the cabby. He waited until Damon removed his two cases from the trunk of the yellow sedan and then gunned his vehicle back out into traffic—on his way to another fare.

Damon shook out the folds of his trench coat, and searched his pocket for the letter that had brought him back to Denbrook. He unfolded the creased piece of parchment and once again examined the cramped, and spidery handwriting.

If you want to find your family’s killers pay Sal, the evidence officer at the Denbrook Municipal Police, forty dollars and ask to see the evidence box for Case #3247652-07.

A Friend

It was a strange letter, and an unexpected clue after all these years of fruitless searching. He’d discovered what sort of creatures the killers of his family were, and he had learned how to fight them, combating creatures like them on a number of occasions. But never had he grown any closer to finding the ones who had left his wife and son nothing more than lifeless, desiccate husks.

He didn’t want to get his hopes up; this could be a red herring or some wild goose chase that the real killer was using to torment him even further. How this person had even tracked him down to send a letter was a mystery. Damon had spent the last several years in Tibet and various parts of Europe. His hunt had last taken him to Chicago where he’d been able to track down the missing intern of a senator—but his effort had come too late to save her. Now the senator was missing, but the populace was fickle and Damon doubted if the voters would really miss one less crooked politician picking their pockets with taxation and hollow promises.

Damon entered through the pocked door marked with the chipped golden star logo of the Municipal Police and immediately ran afoul of a metal detector guarded by a burly and very dark-skinned officer. “You can’t bring those cases into the police station, sir.”

“Of course,” said Damon as he lifted them to the tabletop and let the officer tag them.

“I’ll need to see your I.D.”

Damon produced a bent laminate of his driver’s license, which hadn’t yet been renewed after his return to the United States. 

“St. Cloud,” mused the officer, whose name tag read Gregson. “That sounds familiar.”

Damon didn’t offer any hints, hoping that the officer wouldn’t make the connection.

“Yes! You’re the reporter for the Denbrook Examiner that disappeared after an investigation into our honorable mayor.” There was some slight sarcasm, Damon detected, emphasized on the word ‘honorable.’ “I guess you’re alive after all. We all had a pool going that said you’d been fitted with cement shoes and dropped into the Hopkins—I mean, after your family was found dead and all…” He trailed off lamely.

“I figured I’d pretty much worn out my welcome and got out of the city,” replied Damon as he replaced his I.D. in his worn leather wallet.

“The papers never did release your article on the mayor, did they?”

With a shrug of his powerful shoulders, Damon answered. “After my family was killed it didn’t really seem important anymore.”

“You have any weapons or metallic objects?” asked Officer Gregson.

Damon slipped a mammoth .50 caliber Desert Eagle from the holster beneath his trench coat and laid it on the desk. Beside this he placed a double-pronged dagger with a reservoir in the hilt.

Officer Gregson frowned, a slight furrow creasing his brow. Clearly he’d seen stranger things during his tenure as a police officer in Denbrook, but such heavy firepower was concerning. He began to tag the weapons and locked them in a box beneath the desk, pausing as he put the dagger inside. “What’s the purpose of this reservoir?”

“You’ll sleep easier if you don’t know.”

Gregson bit at the inside of his cheek and put the weapons away. “I’m assuming that you have the proper Concealed Weapons Permit?”

Damon began to pull an out of date permit from his wallet, but Officer Gregson waved him off. “Is there anywhere in particular that I can guide you?”

“I’m looking for the Evidence Officer.”

Gregson pointed a thick arm across the rundown lobby filled with handcuffed thugs of surly demeanor and colorfully-attired streetwalkers awaiting their turn with Denbrook’s fickle finger of justice, and toward a narrow hallway to the left. “Down to the end of the hall, take a left, and then the first right. The evidentiary warehouse is in the very back.”

Damon stepped successfully through the metal detector. “Thank you, Officer.”

“Don’t mention it. By the way, what is it, exactly, that brings you back to Denbrook, Mr. St. Cloud?”

“Some people might call it vengeance,” said Damon as he started across the lobby, “but I like to call it justice.”

Chapter One:

"Welcome to Denbrook"

 

            The house located on McCallum Court was pretty much like most of the houses here in Denbrook Heights.  Three and four story Berkshire style mansions built at the turn of the century for the most part and having been lovingly and carefully maintained and in more than few cases, restored and refurbished to even greater beauty and glory.  This particular house could only be described as sprawling as fully eight acres of carefully maintained and landscaped grounds surrounded it.

            Captain Mitchell Tanner took a look at his watch and squinted at the house.  It was almost time.  He thumbed the slim communicator in his four-fingered hand.  “We’re all set.  He should be coming out of his house anytime soon.  Take him between the house and his car.  I don’t want his wife or kids getting in the way.  Load him up quick and get him outta here.”

            Murmurs of assent came from the com and Tanner put it away and reached on the dashboard for his cup of lukewarm coffee.  The police officer sitting next to him cocked a dubious eye at Tanner.  “Colonel Aysgarth isn’t going to care for you putting the pinch on Toulon without his say so, Captain Tanner.”

            “Colonel Aysgarth can go piss up a rope.  Until my contract with the city is up, I run this precinct and if he doesn’t like it—” Tanner broke off as a gleaming white Mercedes-Benz limousine crunched along the curving gravel path leading from the garage to the front door of the mansion.  The polished double doors opened and Tanner watched as a nattily dressed black man dressed in an eggshell white single-breasted Armani suit with a black silk shirt and blood red tie stepped out of the house. His immaculately coiffed dreadlocks hung down to his waist.  A blond woman and five children who seemed very reluctant to see him leave followed him.

            “Everybody’s got somebody, eh, Captain?”  The police officer grunted.  He was obviously displeased and Tanner couldn’t blame him a bit.

            Tanner watched as the dreadlocked man warmly embraced each of the five children in turn, from the youngest to the oldest and then kissed the blond woman.  While he was saying his goodbyes, the driver of the limousine had gotten out and was holding the rear passenger door open.  Tanner took note of the ten men who had formed a protective phalanx around the limousine.  Dressed very well, just like their boss and why not?  Toulon certainly made enough to dress all his boys like fashion models.  They looked like ads for Yanarella suits.

            The dreadlocked man lightly ran down the steps of his house and just as the sole of his shoe hit the ground, police cars screamed up the driveway, bubblegum racks spinning madly, throwing red and blue splashes of colored light across the shocked faces of the blond woman and her children.  The guards reached for concealed weapons, but uniformed police officers piled out of the vehicles, aiming their guns at the men.  Huge black Wilkofsky and Kardon MM.527 machine guns that could chew up a man in nothing flat.

            “Get down on the ground!  DOWN!  DOWN!”

            “Don’t you move!  Don’t you move!”

            “Lemme see your hands!  Your HANDS, ya dumb sack a’shit!”

            “Get ‘em down on the ground!  Get ‘em DOWN, dammit!”

            The uniforms moved efficiently, screaming orders and threats as they quickly moved among the bodyguards, covering them, pushing them down on the ground, searching them for weapons and covering them with quite the impressive artillery.  While all this was going on, Tanner climbed out of his car and took his time walking up to where the dreadlocked man stood leaning with his large hands on the roof of the limo, awaiting his turn to be searched.  The blond woman had pushed the children inside the mansion and closed the door.  Now she was standing next to the dreadlocked man, whispering quietly in his ear and he was nodding.

            “You want to step aside, Mrs. Toulon?”  Tanner asked.  He smiled without humor at the dreadlocked man who sighed mightily as if all this was just too boring for words and waited to be frisked.  Tanner obliged.  Not that he thought he would actually find anything, but it was worth the extra effort just to humiliate Toulon.

            “May I ask what the charge is, Captain Tanner?”  Toulon asked in a rich baritone that had a curious accent.  Not quite Jamaican, not quite Australian, but a curious mixture of both.  Toulon was maybe five nine, five ten, the same height as Tanner himself. His skin was midnight and his eyes very light brown.  Small carven idols maybe the size of his pinky as well as old golden coins were woven into his dreadlocks.  The coins were so old that the faces had worn off of them and the carven idols had the faces of various animals.  A number of rings adorned his long fingers, rings of gold with symbols carved into the soft metal.

            “Shit, Toulon.  There isn’t a crime in Denbrook that you don’t make a nickel off of.  Let’s just get to the precinct, shall we?  We can talk there.”

            The blond woman spoke up.  “Then I take it that you’re not formally arresting my husband, Captain?”

            Tanner looked the blond woman up and down with open contempt.  “Oh, yeah…seems to me I heard that Toulon up and married his lawyer.  What, you decided the best way to stick close to your best client was to marry him?”

            Arlene Toulon smiled with a wide mouth of dazzling white teeth as she answered;  “I asked you a question, Captain.  And if you don’t want to be slapped with a fistful of suits and injunctions, I suggest you explain what this is all about.”

            “By all means, come along to the precinct, Counselor.  And I hope your husband has a good alibi as to where he was last night.”

            “Why?”

            “Because last night was when somebody decided it was time for Wade Gigante to learn how to swim across Hopkins River.  However, somebody neglected to tell the poor bastard that it’s tough trying to swim with your arms and legs cut off.  We fished him out early this morning.”

            “So why are you harassing my husband?”

            “Toulon isn’t the only suspect down at the precinct.  I’m got a couple of his ‘business rivals’ down there as well and that’s about all you need to know, Counselor.  You coming to the precinct or not?”

 ***

            Titus Hegemon looked up from his paperwork as the door of his office opened.  Hegemon liked the early morning hours to get his paperwork out of the way and prided himself on doing it all himself.  In all the years he’d been in business, he’d never employed a bookkeeper or an accountant to keep his records.  He’d learned well from his parents.  They had been sent to prison by the testimony of their accountant who had turned state’s evidence and testified in court against them.  The Hegemons had never again seen the light of day.

            A dark-haired young man strode into the room, his eyes hidden by very dark sunglasses.  He usually wore them all the time and they didn’t impede his vision in the slightest.  He wore them because he thought they made him look cool and since they were $600 wraparound Cabo shades imported from Italy, he was right.

            Hegemon leaned back in his high backed leather chair and folded his hands across his ample stomach.  “Well?”

            Nickleby LaLoosh grinned easily as he sat on the edge of the massive mahogany desk and reported; “The cops are picking everybody up: Toulon, Fountain, The Capullo Sisters, The Fasolos, everybody.  Tanner’s doing a good job for us.”

            Hegemon grunted.  “He should, the money I’m paying him.  But it’s worth it.”  Hegemon waved a hand in the direction of the marble and steel horseshoe shaped bar over in the far corner of the room.  “Go have a drink.  You’ve earned it.  Was Gigante much trouble?”

            LaLoosh walked over to the bar, taking off his leather topcoat and tossing it onto a couch.  “Screamed like a little bitch through it all.  The boys kept asking me to knock him out but I wasn’t having it.  I owed Gigante.”

            “I know you did.  That’s why I didn’t think you’d mind taking him out of the picture once and for all.”  Hegemon smiled at the younger man with the fondness of an uncle for a beloved nephew.  He watched LaLoosh make his drink for a minute or so before bending back to his paperwork.   Hegemon’s office occupied the top floor of a three-story building located just off Cunningham Street in The Barrens. The second floor was Hegemon’s living quarters and the first floor was his nightclub.

            The Barrens was where Denbrook went to party and party hard.  The whole thing had pretty much been taken over by nightclubs, high class and lowbrow strip joints, bars, cabarets and Hegemon prided himself on being the owner of one of the best known of the nightclubs. Langtry’s had opened up seven years ago amid a veritable media blitz. Hegemon had always wanted to own an upscale nightclub with quality entertainment for a variety of reasons, the main one being that he liked to listen to good music and sultry torch songs.  And while Downtown Blackwood catered to the younger crowd who were into hip-hop, psychopunx and the jujutech scenes, Langtry’s was where the older crowd liked to go to hear the music from ‘the good old days’ as they liked to call it.  Personally, Hegemon wondered just what the hell they were talking about.  He’d lived in Denbrook all of his sixty-one years and had never known when Denbrook had had ‘good old days’.

            Nickleby LaLoosh walked back over and sat down in a chair across from Hegemon, who placed his pen aside.  Behind him was a rectangular window of distortion glass.  Anyone looking from the outside in would see everything in the room as being a foot to the right of where it actually was.  The glass had saved Hegemon’s life thirteen years ago when he’d gone to war with The Guilford Consortium and hadn’t that been a bad year for business.  The window overlooked the wide street, which was empty save for a few stragglers leaving some of the really late closing clubs and bars.  It was only Wednesday.  The Barrens wouldn’t really get cranking until the weekend, but during the week it was still an active part of town.  Many of the bars and clubs and strip joints ran practically twenty-four hours a day.  Hegemon himself had been up all night.  He preferred it that way.  After he tallied up the night’s receipts, he’d have breakfast and then go to sleep until around 2 in the afternoon and be ready for the night’s business.  And the true source of his financial empire.

            “Okay, so the cops are making a big show over the late Wade Gigante.  Our deal should go through without any feedback then.  Am I correct?”

            LaLoosh nodded and took a sip of his gin and tonic.  “I spoke to Van Pallenberg about eight hours ago.  He’s put together the shipment.  The only thing you have tell him is where and when.”

            Hegemon nodded in satisfaction.  “You tell him he can move right now.  The sooner those guns are in Denbrook, the sooner he can get the rest of his money.”

    LaLoosh nodded and reached into the inside pocket of his jacket for his cell phone and flipped it open and said into it; “Pallenberg”.  The voice-activated dialing took over and within seconds, LaLoosh was speaking to his party.

            “Reggie, what up, son?  It’s the Loosher.  I just spoke with The Man and he says let’s move on this deal.  Nah, son.  Don’t worry about anything.  We got it sewed up.  We want the shipment delivered to the usual place as soon as you can.  Yeah.  Yeah.  Sure, no problem.  Yeah.  Okay.  Call me back if there’s any problem.  Later.”  LaLoosh closed up the phone and tucked it away.  “We’re good.  He’s got everything loaded on trucks and he’s going to start them rolling right now.  They’re coming up The Bell Longhampton from St. Baxter and they’ll be here by tonight.”

            “Excellent.”  Hegemon’s wide, handsome face broke out into a grin of sheer pleasure.  And why shouldn’t he be pleased?  He’d been dealing in weapons of mass destruction for forty years now but this wasn’t an ordinary deal.  No, far from it.  He’d bought weapons for armies of criminals, sure.  But this was the first time he’d bought weapons for a real army. And it was going to make him rich enough to get out of the business once and for all. 

            LaLoosh was looking at him with those hidden eyes.  “Bet I know what you’re thinking: it’s really happening at last.”

            Hegemon nodded.  “Eighty million dollars is a lot of money.  Enough to pay off everybody and still have enough left over that I wouldn’t ever have to worry about anything or anybody.”

            “And everything else is mine, right?”  LaLoosh asked.

            “Of course.  Except for Langtry’s.  Outside of that, everything else is going to be yours.  It’s only fair.  You’re the one who’s kept me alive the past ten years and your father kept me alive before then.  I owe the LaLoosh family more than I could ever really repay.  Your father and your uncle were at my side when I started out and you…you they would have been proud of if they could have seen how well you’ve done in the family business.”

            Nickleby LaLoosh removed his dark glasses and smiled with artificial eyes that were gray and red in color.  As he squinted slightly, targeting grids appeared on the surface on his eyes.  Artificial eyes that made Nickleby LaLoosh the most feared gunman in Denbrook.

            “I had help,” he said simply.

 ***

            “Sir?  We’re coming into Shepherd Plaza Station.” The helpful conductor gently touched the sleeping passenger’s shoulder.  But the passenger hadn’t been sleeping.  It was just his nature when not actively doing anything to be so still that most people observing believed that he had indeed drifted off to sleep.  He looked up and nodded his thanks at the conductor and reached inside his jacket pocket for a pair of round-framed glasses that he put on.  Then he looked out the window for the first time during the long train ride from Hamlin.

            Five hours on a train might have been an ordeal on any other train, but this was Guilford Railways and all their trains were a pleasure to ride on.  His luxuriously padded seat reclined and tilted back and he was able to travel in even more comfort since he had purchased the seat next to him.  The other passengers in the coach were noisily preparing to disembark from the train as it grumbled into the cavernous train station with much steam and noise and groaned to a final stop.

            He waited until everybody else had gotten off the train and he was therefore the last passenger to get off.  The conductor was outside the door, on the platform, helping everybody off with a smile as tips were pressed into his hand. 

            The passenger pressed a ten-dollar bill into the conductor’s hand.  “Where can I catch a cab?  I need to get to The Argento Hotel.”

            The conductor grinned and pointed.  “There are plenty of cabs right outside the station entrance, sir.  You can’t miss ‘em.  And welcome to Denbrook, sir.”

            The passenger nodded and walked toward a newsstand.  A tall, slender man dressed in a conservative black business suit with an ankle length black duster.  He moved with an easy, fluid grace that gave the impression of tightly controlled power.  At the newsstand he ran his eyes over the nine or so different daily newspapers.  “Which one do you suggest?”  He asked the Asian news dealer.

            The man shrugged. “They all lie, man.  Don’t you know you can’t trust the media?  They’re part of the corporate power structure.  They serve the elite.”

            “No shit.  But I just got into town and I’d like to catch up on the local news, that sort of thing.”

            The news dealer shrugged and pointed.  “Try The Daily Crusader, then.”

            “The most honest?”

            “Nah.  The best cartoons.”

            A smile flirted briefly with the passenger’s full lips as he picked up the paper and handed over some coins. He folded the paper and tucked it under an arm and walked through the bustling station.  It was almost cathedral like with hundred foot tall bronze and onyx statues of the zodiac in alcoves spaced evenly in the curving walls of the station.  Hundreds of men and women were rushing to and fro, bent on their tasks, most of them changing trains from the suburbs outside of Denbrook to the city’s subway system proper.  The passenger made his made to the entrance and walked out on the street, which was washed with the early morning sun. 

            Parked across the street from the station was a dark brown Plymouth sedan with two passengers.  One was curled up in the back seat, sleeping quietly.  The other was sitting in the driver’s seat with a digital camera.  Detective Lea Kostelski ignored the raspy snores of her partner, Detective Jimmy Gill.  She absolutely hated pulling this duty.  She resented it with every fiber of her being but it was their turn on the duty rotation so here they were, as they had been for the past two days and would be for the next two, watching the main entrance of Shepherd Plaza Station, looking for suspicious faces.  If one was spotted, they would then take a picture with the digital camera and the computer in their car would go to work to match up the face. 

            The reason Lea hated this duty was for the simple reason that when they DID spot a bad customer, they couldn’t do anything.  Their job was to simply monitor the station for possible criminals coming into Denbrook and identify and pass the information along to the precinct and let them handle it.  Lea frankly thought it was a stupid detail.  She snapped more pictures, just to have something to do and fed the data from the camera into the computer and listened to more of Gill’s snoring.  She was amazed that no two snores sounded alike.  It really was sort of remarkable.

            The computer beeped for attention and Lea put the camera down and waited as a series of faces blurred by in a rush of pixels, finally locking onto one.  Lea read the info that scrolled up on the left of the screen and reached over the seat to wake Gill up.  “Jimmy, get up. We got one.”

            Gill sat up, slowly, wiping drool from his chin with one hand while dry washing his long, pale face with the other.  “What we got?”

            Lea gestured at the computer screen, passing a menthol cigarette back to Gill.  “Take a look at this.”

            Gill lit the cigarette and inhaled deeply, coming completely awake as the smoke hit his lungs.  He looked at the screen intently.  “Well, I’ll be.  Isn’t he supposed to be dead?”

            “According to this, he was presumed dead.  He hadn’t been seen for two years.  That’s when he was working for The Bandreii Alliance in Foreman City.  And you know what he did out there.”

            Gill nodded.  “What the hell is Diamondback Vogel doing here in Denbrook?  Where’s he been for two years?”

            Lea was starting the car.  “Let’s go find out.  He’s catching a cab.”

            Gill placed a cautioning hand on his partner’s shoulder.  “Whoa.  Just hold on a minnit, there, Cochise.  We’re to stay put.  We get a positive I.D. on any suspicious characters, we’re to pass along the info and let the higher ups make a decision on what to do about it.”

            “You gotta be kidding me!  We’ve just spotted Diamondback Vogel!  He disappeared for two years after the bloodiest gang war Foreman City had seen in thirty years!  The guy’s a known killer and you want to pass along this to some fat-ass desk jockey who’s going to parlay this into a promotion?  What are you, stupid or just brain dead?”  Lea cranked up the car.  “I don’t get you sometimes.  Don’t you want a promotion?  Move up outta dead end shit details like this?”

            Gill inhaled another lungful of cancer before saying; “Yeah, I do.  But I intend getting it by staying inside departmental guidelines.  You like buckin’ the system and makin’ waves.  And a player like Diamondback Vogel...you think that the Metropol don’t know he’s here?”

            Gill was referring to The Metropolitan Police Force, under the command of Colonel Jacoby Aysgarth.  The Metropol was pretty much the private police force of the movers and shakers in Denbrook.  High-tech cops on the payroll of the rich, famous and powerful whose main job was to pretty much keep the lid on organized crime and look out after the high rollers when they stepped in the shit.  Lea and Gill were detectives with The Municipal Police, who were the good right arm of the politicians and the technocrats.  Supposedly, they were also supposed to be protecting the interests of the common man.  But when you lived in Denbrook long enough, you understood one thing: everybody looked out for whoever took care of his or her interests.

            Lea snorted in disgust as she expertly followed the cab through the early morning rush hour traffic.  “Look, you in or not?  A player like Diamondback Vogel comes to Denbrook; there’s gotta be something in the wind.”

            Gill was thinking the same thing, but not for the same reasons Lea was.  “Hell, yeah…you’re my partner.  I’m in.”

 ***

            The Argento Hotel was a glorious baroque structure located on West 59^th Street and 8^th Avenue.  A hundred stories high, it was decorated with brass gargoyles that crouched as if ready to take flight and marble angels who seemed to watch the gargoyles reproachfully.  Nearly two hundred years old, it was a landmark of Denbrook, having been built by the eccentric architect Michael Argento, who had constructed hotels and hospitals all over the world. 

            The lobby of The Argento Hotel was more like a museum than a hotel lobby, with many large paintings decorating the walls and statues of gold and marble placed in locations pleasing to the eyes.  Diamondback walked through the lobby, noting the police officers who were pretending to be reading newspapers but were actually looking for suspicious characters and Diamondback knew good and well he fitted in that category.

            At the reception desk, he waited patiently in line.  The Argento was a popular hotel and there was always a constant stream of people coming in and out.  When it was his turn, he stepped up to the desk and placed a black plastic card on the marble surface.  The female receptionist didn’t even bat an eye but turned and motioned for a man in a green suit with thin brown hair and baggy, watchful eyes to come over.  The man did so and picked up the card and looked at it with a practiced eye.

            “Would you come with me, sir?”

            Diamondback said nothing and merely followed the man in the green suit to an office behind the counter where they could have privacy.  The man in the green suit closed the door and motioned for Diamondback to sit.  The black card was inserted into a slot on the computer sitting on the desk and after a few minutes of humming and bleeping and blooping from the computer, the card was returned and whatever the man in the green suit saw on the screen, he was satisfied because he returned the black card to Diamondback.

            “Your identity has been confirmed, sir.  I have been authorized to provide you with everything and anything you need while you stay here at The Argento.  My name is Chet.  There is a message on this computer for you.  You will receive it here and then it will be wiped from every existing database.” Chet left the room and Diamondback made himself comfortable in front of the computer screen.  He reached in a pocket and took out a pack of Newports and lit up one.  The computer screen went black for a few seconds and then a picture formed as the message was accessed. 

            A man appeared on the screen.  And the man was Diamondback Vogel himself.

            “This is the first, last and only time we’re going to talk like this, my friend.  Everything has been arraigned for you.  You’ve got an executive suite on the 25^th floor and in that room is a suitcase with $200,000 dollars in cash.  There are a couple of bank accounts that have been set up for you that amount to another $300,000.  That should be more than enough to get you started.”

            The Diamondback Vogel on the screen leaned forward slightly as he continued. “This ends the debt I owe you.  As of right now, there is nothing between us, understand?  What you do now is all on you.  Needless to say, you cannot, you MUST not fail.”

            The computer screen went black.  Diamondback smoked in silence for minute and then said three words out loud to the empty room.

            “Welcome to Denbrook.”